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

blogs.nvidia.com

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

#241

Post by judge2020 »

unanswered wrote: post #222

A lot of comments are referring to hardware freedom to run what you want but I don't see anywhere in the article saying that you can't run whatever you want to on this hardware. It's just going to pretend to be slower hardware, not cut off capabilities. It seems entirely within Nvidia's moral rights to release a product that is not the best possible of all conceivable products; that's literally the point of the budge…

The issue seems to be that it's the driver doing the halving, not the hardware itself, which is a little odd. Given the large profitability, anyone who actually buys 3060's for mining will hack the driver/pay for a hacked driver that removes this limitation.

> RTX 3060 software drivers are designed to detect specific attributes of the Ethereum cryptocurrency mining algorithm, and limit the hash rate, or cryptocurrency mining efficiency, by around 50 percent.

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

#243

Post by arsome »

Sounds like it's time to crack some NVIDIA drivers. I already do it for the video encoding limitations, why not this too? Miners are willing to go to some really hacky extremes, reflashing firmwares, custom fan mods, extreme overclock configurations, etc to maximize hashrates and certainly won't care if they have to jump through some hoops to patch a specific version of the Linux driver or enable unsigned drivers on Windows, as long as they make more profit.

Good luck with this one NVIDIA but you're playing a losing game. As soon as one un-restricted version of the driver exists, this is as good as useless and demand will be the same as ever for these cards unless they're able to ship CMP cards at a very high rate, but my understanding is the restriction here is silicon.

Let's not forget that last time they produced "mining only" cards, people managed to crack the drivers to render graphics too... this is no exception.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TY4s35uULg4

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

#244

Post by Klwohu »

TomVDB wrote: post #218
Tenoke wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> So Kudos to them for doing this I'd rather they have scaled up the demand. They've had years of this to take the higher profits and invest them. Even if people don't use them for mining, the demand for Machine Learning is there - instead GeForce cards have been banned for use in data centers for years. Not to mention that the crippling of 3060 would be trivial for mining operations to get around.

> I'd rather they have scaled up the demand. There are car factories shutting down due to lack of chips. The silicon for the systems that I work on has its lead times increased from the customary How do you suggest they scale up demand short of building their own fabs? (Which I hope you aren't suggesting...)

Building more fabs is the only sustainable solution. Demand is higher than supply, and miners will just use older drivers or figure out a workaround pretty quickly, unless the new mining cards are substantially cheaper yet just as fast as the "gaming" GPUs.

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

#245

Post by throwaway1777 »

Tenoke wrote: post #106
ralmidani wrote: post #50

I would normally be appalled by such an action, but the supply issues for RTX 30x0 cards are beyond ridiculous. Mining trashes the environment and, for the majority of crypto assets/volumes, does not provide genuinely valuable economic activity besides speculation (I say that as someone who has put thousands of dollars into crypto in the past). Why should people who want to try some ML/DL at home (maybe they even nee…

> I really wish Nvidia would do this across the RTX product line. I'd rather they have scaled up the demand. They've had years of this to take the higher profits and invest them. Even if people don't use them for mining, the demand for Machine Learning is there - instead GeForce cards have been banned for use in data centers for years. Not to mention that the crippling of 3060 would be trivial for mining operations t…

You do realize there is a global chip shortage right now? It’s not as easy as clicking a button in ec2 to suddenly make more gpus.

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

#246

Post by pizza234 »

Klwohu wrote: post #215

Hahaha, this can't be real. Will they gimp the RTX-3060 in other applications like machine learning too? Will people who already bought these cards for mining have to watch out for updated drivers or firmware? This is an absolute nightmare scenario which will come back to haunt Nvidia for years. I can't believe they approved this. It'll be interesting to see how games perform on the newly gimped cards people already…

> Will they gimp the RTX-3060 in other applications like machine learning too?

While their move is questionable (I don't judge, but recognize that it's questionable), there is a situation out there that is 1. specific and 2. concrete (gaming cards that can't be purchased for gaming), which is unlikely to apply also to machine learning.

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

#247

Post by patriksvensson »

dannyw wrote: post #191
0xfaded wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Honest question: Have you calculated your profits now VS what your profits would have been if those same $$ purchased the cryptocurrency of your choice on the day you bought the cards instead? Which would have been more profitable (taking selling the equipment after into consideration as well).

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

#248

Post by judge2020 »

wtallis wrote: post #202
zelon88 wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's for the people who already own the card. If you're in the market for a new card and you have the option of a powerful, purpose-built card that works out of the box or one that needs endless tweaking, few people would choose the more complex option. Especially if it means every new driver that gets released is going to require days to make work properly.

There's no "endless tweaking" to keep your GPU mining rig working. Constant GPU driver updates are the norm for gaming GPUs because GPU drivers include a huge pile of workarounds for buggy games, and there are new buggy games hitting the market all the time. But if you just want to run a specific straightforward GPGPU task like a miner, you only need to get one driver version properly cracked to unlock full performan…

Plus, part of the profitability of mining cards is being able to resell them once their profitability is low (and they do usually still work fine for gaming after a year of mining). The new mining cards will have to be insanely profitable to make them look better than the 30-series cards.

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

#249

Post by wmf »

lima wrote: post #82
the-enterprise wrote: post #63

(1) Many gamers are miners in their spare time! (2) Big Mining operations actually write their own drivers (3) Huge Mining operations even use custom boards (4) I heard that that Nvidia has been selling silicon directly to the big boys ( https://wccftech.com/nvidia-allegedly-sold-175-million-worth... ) (5) With this action I expect its only the little guys getting removed from the game here (1) a huge benefit for the…

The objective seems to be to stop miners from buying up consumer GPUs. Nvidia added a separate product line for mining.

If both those product lines use the same dies, mining is still taking GPUs away from gamers.

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

#250

Post by Klwohu »

terramex wrote: post #237
Klwohu wrote: post #215

Hahaha, this can't be real. Will they gimp the RTX-3060 in other applications like machine learning too? Will people who already bought these cards for mining have to watch out for updated drivers or firmware? This is an absolute nightmare scenario which will come back to haunt Nvidia for years. I can't believe they approved this. It'll be interesting to see how games perform on the newly gimped cards people already…

RTX 3060 has not been released yet, it goes on sale February 25th.

OK, but it still seems like a problem until people can see that this doesn't affect their games. Perhaps this will reduce demand among miners after all.

I shouldn't be surprised - this is what Nvidia already does with their Quadro vs. consumer line. Heck, I owned a Sound Blaster Live! which was functionally equivalent to the EMU APS and used the hacked drivers for years back in the olden days.

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