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Nvidia announces mining GPUs, cuts the hash rate of RTX-3060 in half

blogs.nvidia.com

191–200 of 762 posts

Re: Nvidia announces mining GPUs, cuts the hash rate of RTX-3060 in half

#191
post #157

I'm a miner (7x3070, 2x3080, 1x3090) and I support this nerf. The reason is because I am also a gamer, and it's always regrettable that cryptocurrency mining has made gaming cards out of reach.

Out of curiosity how did you get those cards? Did you manage to buy them at retail or is the economics such that the miners are willing to pay the scalper premium?

I bought them through a IT reseller, at more or less retail price around here.

Re: Nvidia announces mining GPUs, cuts the hash rate of RTX-3060 in half

#192
post #183
post #157

I'm a miner (7x3070, 2x3080, 1x3090) and I support this nerf. The reason is because I am also a gamer, and it's always regrettable that cryptocurrency mining has made gaming cards out of reach.

Are you making a profit mining? Or is it more of a “supporting the network” kind of thing?

I'm projected to make a generous profit, but that actually depends on the continued Ethereum price.

Re: Nvidia announces mining GPUs, cuts the hash rate of RTX-3060 in half

#193
post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I use CUDA for scientific calculations and I wonder how this will affect GPU performance since any detection algorithm may have fault positives. The only problem with such artificial limitation is that usually people who mine crypto are very inventive (if you have doubts about that just check laptop mining farms [1]), since they try to squeeze out as many H/s as possible. It is just a matter of time when the 'right'…

> since any detection algorithm may have fault positives Though not impossible, NVIDIA has been doing application detection for ages for the purpose of tuning the performance of the latest popular games. So as long as your scientific calculations don't calculate too much Keccak-256 hashes, they should probably be fine.

Their application detection is based on executable name. Fairly popular game I worked on was misdetected because apparently we used executable name of some decade old FPS. They fixed it in NVidia Control Panel, but Shadowplay continues to put gameplay recordings in wrong folder to this day.

Re: Nvidia announces mining GPUs, cuts the hash rate of RTX-3060 in half

#194
post #15

Gamers hate miners, they're driving the price up, make hardware impossible to get ect ... It's a really problematic situation. Almost 6 month after launching new graphic cards from AMD / NVIDIA good luck gettting an RTX 30xx or 6800. On a side note all those virtual currency are just plain wrong on the environment side, it does not make any sense in 2021 to have a currency that need heavy computation thus increasing…

The CBECI tool estimates that bitcoin consumes about 15.24 gigawatts. There are approximately 2 million employees working at FDIC insured banks in the United States.[2] There are approximately 330 million people in the United States.[3] United States food production uses about 10 quadrillion BTUs per year (about 332 gigawatts = [10 quadrillion BTU / (365 24 60 60) sec to gigawatts]). 332 gigawatts / 330 million ~ 1kW…

You are comparing (baseline US power use/person x number of people working at banks) to (power consumed to do the computations to operate the bitcoin blockchain).

I fail to see how this is relevant to the question of how bitcoin compares to the banking system as a system for storing and transferring money from an energy perspective.

The relevant comparison would be to compare the costs of doing a similar volume of similar operations using bitcoin and the bank system.

Re: Nvidia announces mining GPUs, cuts the hash rate of RTX-3060 in half

#195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> ‘long run’ That’s on the order of years for this problem. I would imagine that Nvidia doesn’t think it could survive the reputational costs of charging market clearing prices for their cards for years - effectively proscribing their core gamer market for the entire period. Sure, that’s what’s happening now, but it’s the fault of scalpers not a business decision by Nvidia. The scalpers get the ire of the core market…

So they essentially got themselves in a pickle. It looks like they have not invested money in infrastructure and instead lowered prices to attract as many people as possible thinking what they currently have will be "enough". They have not predicted that the demand will be so high that it will exceed their current abilities and they have no money to increase the production and they are unable to raise the money witho…

The problem is that everybody wants to build on newest TSMC and maybe Samsung fabs.

Apple outbid everyone (and given their budget, will continue to do so.), so the rest of them are fighting for whatever capacity is left.

TSMC is expanding, but new factories take years to build.

So the issue here is mostly the overreliance of whole world on TSMC and Samsung.

Re: Nvidia announces mining GPUs, cuts the hash rate of RTX-3060 in half

#196

Aren't ASIC miners at least an order (or in the case of Bitcoin, several orders) of magnitude more efficient than these chips? Is this just more attractive in terms of more easily accessible supply?

ASICs are great for Bitcoin because B’s algo strains the math features of a chip. An ASIC can bake a whole iteration of the algo into a single, huge instruction. Many people in the community don’t like ASICs in crypto because they believe their high cost and rarity creates a hurdle for mass adoption. Every kid playing games on their computer has a GPU, but it’s much harder for that same kid to get their hands in an A…

Looking up (admittedly expensive) ASICs on Amazon shows ASICs that outperform MH/s/watt on Etherium by 2x vs the best nVidia card announced.

Re: Nvidia announces mining GPUs, cuts the hash rate of RTX-3060 in half

#198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> since any detection algorithm may have fault positives Though not impossible, NVIDIA has been doing application detection for ages for the purpose of tuning the performance of the latest popular games. So as long as your scientific calculations don't calculate too much Keccak-256 hashes, they should probably be fine.

Their application detection is based on executable name. Fairly popular game I worked on was misdetected because apparently we used executable name of some decade old FPS. They fixed it in NVidia Control Panel, but Shadowplay continues to put gameplay recordings in wrong folder to this day.

Huh wow, I would have guessed that it was based on some more complicated heuristics. Well then I guess my previous comment is moot.

Re: Nvidia announces mining GPUs, cuts the hash rate of RTX-3060 in half

#199

While I hate the GPU shortage, I dont think this is the right way to go. Artificially limiting what you can and cannot do on your hardware is a bad precedent.

It's also a precedent nvidia (and AMD) set well over a decade ago by limiting several features to their quadro line. 5-10 years ago it was 10-12bit color. Today it's SR-IOV. There was also the gsync/freesync debacle not so long ago.

This is the first time the ends have even remotely justified the means.

Re: Nvidia announces mining GPUs, cuts the hash rate of RTX-3060 in half

#200
post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why shouldn't people be allowed to use their GPUs how they want?

Why shouldn't companies be allowed to do product segmentation? Limiting mining performance on a consumer GPU is no different than limiting certain professional or machine learning specific performance features.

This isn't about product segmentation. They're artificially neutering their product.

It's perfectly fine to offer a different product that's designed for better performance but to artificially limit product A so that people are forced to buy product B (that's probably more expensive) is messed up.

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