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Nvidia cripples cryptocurrency mining on RTX 3080 and 3070 cards

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Re: Nvidia cripples cryptocurrency mining on RTX 3080 and 3070 cards

#131

Post by onethought »

shagie wrote: post #70
fastball wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What if you're only mining with renewables? And I'd actually like to see a study on the positive mental health benefit of gaming, because I'm skeptical. Also the idea that you need a primo GPU in order to game is a bit silly. And if you're the kind of person that absolutely needs the best graphics in order to enjoy gaming, please see my point no. 2 about mental health.

> What if you're only mining with renewables? The issue isn't the "we're using renewable energy - see, this doesn't make things worse." It also doesn't make things better. Whats more, its increasing the consumption of energy which is at the core of the problem. It would have been even better to push that renewable energy out onto the grid (and also not increase the consumption of power for crypto mining). Switching a…

I mine on renewables and with 3000 series gpus. I didn’t want to do any of this, I ended up here because my energy retailer decided to tax me for exporting too much energy to the grid. So short of earthing the electricity, my solution was to burn it up in mining, and improve my solar roi.

The 3000 series gpus are the most efficient hashes/watt. So actually by disabling this, you are driving people towards less efficient/worse for the environment ASICS machines.

Yes I batteried my home, and use my solar on everything I can first... there is still excess... especially at peak.

Pretty sure this dismantled most of your argument.

Re: Nvidia cripples cryptocurrency mining on RTX 3080 and 3070 cards

#132

Post by maerF0x0 »

nyjah wrote: post #125

I have a dumb theoretical question, but I genuinely don't understand the answer. Why wouldn't nvidia and amd or any other card maker just keep the cards and mine all the cryptocurrency for themselves?

I would suspect the reason is marginal electricity cost. Nvidia likely has to pay full marginal price on electricity whereas miners maybe geo located with cheaper electricity, or marginally free electricity (such as so called stranded energy or used in places where heat is already being created by electric heaters, but one could get marginally free computation done)

Re: Nvidia cripples cryptocurrency mining on RTX 3080 and 3070 cards

#133

Post by akersten »

542458 wrote: post #121
akersten wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yep, this enrages me. Deliberately introducing faults into a product to make it less appealing to one market segment in a desperate attempt to cover for their supply chain failure. Stinks to high heaven. In addition the detection is not magic (it can't be) so there are going to be false positives. Can't wait until my games start dropping frames 30 minutes in because the driver decided my competitive FPS was actually…

GPUs have been doing this forever. This is exactly the same as some features being enabled on quadros that don’t exist on RTX/GTX/GT cards. That’s (mostly) not silicon, that’s just firmware. This isn’t covering any supply chain failures (despite what nvidia says, the number of available GPUs remains approximately fixed), it’s just more market segmentation to minimize the secondhand mining GPU market and capture more…

> GPUs have been doing this forever though. This is exactly the same as some features being enabled on quadros that don’t exist on RTX/GTX/GT cards.

No, I think this is the first time a GPU has been heuristically trying to detect what you're doing and self-limiting in response. How is that equivalent to features just being literally off?

There's no special "mine-crypto" instruction in the CUDA ISA.

> there have been no false positives that I can see.

How can you see that? These aren't released yet and the GTX-3060 isn't really a popular card among serious gamers that would notice.

Re: Nvidia cripples cryptocurrency mining on RTX 3080 and 3070 cards

#134

Post by Griffinsauce »

nyjah wrote: post #125

I have a dumb theoretical question, but I genuinely don't understand the answer. Why wouldn't nvidia and amd or any other card maker just keep the cards and mine all the cryptocurrency for themselves?

It would destroy their business?

They'd have short term massive gains but it wouldn't be sustainable.

Re: Nvidia cripples cryptocurrency mining on RTX 3080 and 3070 cards

#135

Post by est31 »

nyjah wrote: post #125

I have a dumb theoretical question, but I genuinely don't understand the answer. Why wouldn't nvidia and amd or any other card maker just keep the cards and mine all the cryptocurrency for themselves?

Actually that's what some companies in the ASIC supply chain have done when the first bitcoin ASICs came out (2014ish I think?). That's probably because of the kinds of people in those companies, and the kinds of markets those companies operate in, i.e. solely in the bitcoin mining market. Nvidia and AMD mainly sell their GPUs for various other use cases other than mining, and the mining uses are quite recent. Nvidia is also known for building different products for different market segments, and they do have dedicated GPUs made for mining. I.e. in 2018 they forbode machine learning uses in datacenters of their consumer hardware in their EULAs, to push people to their professional hardware instead. https://www.datacenterdynamics.com/en/news/nvidia-updates-ge...

Re: Nvidia cripples cryptocurrency mining on RTX 3080 and 3070 cards

#136

Post by agilob »

lvl100 wrote: post #130

Too little too late? I think mining has peaked with ETH POS shift weeks away. We will soon find out how much of Nvidia’s business was truly driven by crypto versus what they conveyed to investors in the past.

>Too little too late

Just on time for ETH to move away from PoW! It's almost like NVidia waited for ETH

Re: Nvidia cripples cryptocurrency mining on RTX 3080 and 3070 cards

#137

Post by gspr »

nyjah wrote: post #125

I have a dumb theoretical question, but I genuinely don't understand the answer. Why wouldn't nvidia and amd or any other card maker just keep the cards and mine all the cryptocurrency for themselves?

For the same reason that many companies that happen by chance to have real estate as their most valuable asset don't wanna pivot to being real estate companies.

Re: Nvidia cripples cryptocurrency mining on RTX 3080 and 3070 cards

#138

Post by themodelplumber »

nyjah wrote: post #125

I have a dumb theoretical question, but I genuinely don't understand the answer. Why wouldn't nvidia and amd or any other card maker just keep the cards and mine all the cryptocurrency for themselves?

Can you imagine? They could do anything, they could create a corporate utopia.

I wonder if the corporate psychology is similar to human psychology. In which, far from being run by a green field thinker like you, they are short-term oriented, and mainly backwards-looking for the sake of emotional security--we already know best what works for us.

Re: Nvidia cripples cryptocurrency mining on RTX 3080 and 3070 cards

#139

Post by void_mint »

cma wrote: post #104
void_mint wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At some point, someone has to take action against harmful behavior, right? In the last few years, we've seen tons extremely problematic behavior arise out of well-principled technology (all of social media, cryptocurrency, etc). Groups of people say "When will we do something?!?!?!", and then, when something is done, other people say "But the principle of ___!". Sometime, someone has to do something about problematic…

Do you really believe Nvidia is being an enforcer here to "take action against harmful behavior"? It's just price discrimination. They saw they were leaving money on the table. Unless they thought it a huge PR win to do it, it's probably not much different in motivation than the previous thing with them segmenting out datacenter use.

> Do you really believe Nvidia is being an enforcer here to "take action against harmful behavior"?

Nvidia has deemed crypto mining harmful to their brand and product and have taken action against it, so yes I do believe that.

> It's just price discrimination

And?

Re: Nvidia cripples cryptocurrency mining on RTX 3080 and 3070 cards

#140

Post by luma »

akersten wrote: post #123
slownews45 wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm thrilled by this. This has been a common approach in I think almost every industry. What nvidia is doing is recognizing that the needs of existing long time consumers / clients / partners are not being met by the current situation. Yes, it inflates short term profits and increases their pricing power, but long run if you can't buy nvidia for your dev box, your game box etc, this reduces the long run nvidia ecosys…

If this works (spoiler: it won't, it will be cracked within a month), it will create more e-Waste as miners will toss their no-video-output-mining-only cards after they're no longer the latest tech, instead of being able to resell them to gamers, thinning the used graphics card market, forcing more gamers to buy new from nVidia instead of rebuying old cards online. That makes me angry, it should make you angry too.

They are clearly marking the new models with a new suffix on the model number. As someone who has been trying for months to buy a 3080 and has zero interest in crypto, this is fantastic news... IFF it means I can actually purchase a card.

This doesn't make me angry, and I don't think it should make you angry either.

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