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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

#201

Post by willis936 »

PragmaticPulp wrote: post #91
willis936 wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Indeed. I buy fast computers because they are fun toys. What if I want to play around with password cracking on my gaming machine? Is the hardware going to detect that I am running hash algorithms and throttle it? Is this a game reserved for state-level players behind closed doors?

> What if I want to play around with password cracking on my gaming machine? Currently, you'd have to pay $2500 or more to buy a scalped card anyway unless you get really, really lucky with something like the Newegg Shuffle. If they break the mining incentive, they're going to drop the price of these cards and also make them more available. I'd rather have a hashrate limited card that I can actually buy at a reasonab…

Well, the article does say that it will only be in a future revision of cards. I already bought a new 3070 from a friend for a mere 10% over the (already ludicrous) MSRP.

What about when ETH moves to PoS or the crypto market crashes? The concern is that this feels more like a ratchet in a bad direction rather than a temporary fix.

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

#202

Post by rurp »

988747 wrote: post #158
valuearb wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because BTC is down 30% in the last month?

No one mines BTC on GPU, and Etherum is up 100% from two weeks ago. Ok, I understand that NVidia does not want to mine themselves, but why on Earth won't they just raise the prices to the level miners are willing to pay? "We want to sell to gamers, not miners" is the stupidest excuse ever. Isn't capitalism all about selling to the highest bidder? Why do they even care about who buys their product? EDIT: Also, think a…

>Isn't capitalism all about selling to the highest bidder?

Capitalism can be about that, but there's a lot more to it than simply charging the highest price possible on every transaction. For example, loss leader products and free trials are common across industries. I don't have any insight into Nvidia's thinking specifically, but they might believe that cultivating the gaming market by not pricing gamers out of their product in the short term has much more longterm value than going all in on of the most volatile industires in the world.

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

#203

Post by m3kw9 »

wbraun wrote: post #2

Does this behavior anger anyone else on a deep level? I get that its hard to buy GPUs right now, but this seems like such an attack on general purpose computing. Hardware manufactures already segment features between consumer and busness grade parts that the silicon itself is capable of, such as virtualization, but restricting what algorithms one can run is a whole new level. I am pretty sure my next GPU is going to…

Not at all, part of the reason is crypto miners buy up all the supplies and gamers can’t buy them. Then when crypto prices fall they dump old cards back onto the market. It hurts both sides

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

#204

Post by PragmaticPulp »

patrickk wrote: post #170
PragmaticPulp wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The casual customer will still be buying GPUs 10 years from now. The bulk order GPU miners will stop ordering GPUs the minute mining becomes unprofitable. With proof-of-stake and ASICs on the horizon, this could happen rather abruptly. When miners are done with GPUs, they're going to unload them on the secondary market. The used GPU market is going to be flooded with GPUs that have been overclocked and run with the d…

Actually GPUs used for mining are typically undervolted to keep power costs down, and by running them 24/7 there is less thermal expansion and contraction so they’re not expected to fail at higher rates than other GPUs. Source: I used to mine ETH years ago on used AMD GPUs when that was still profitable. From perusing mining forums this is still standard practice. I eventually sold all the GPUs and all of them worked…

Doesn't really matter. Running a card 100% 24/7 is still harder on it that gaming a couple hours per day.

GPUs are relatively reliable, but fans less so. The failures are usually an early death of the fan, which can't be replaced without strapping something else to the shroud with zip ties or watercooling it.

Miners aren't usually impacted because the failures happen after several years. It's the downstream buyers who lose out and then associate the brand with premature failure.

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

#205

Post by paxys »

NazakiAid wrote: post #56

A major bad point with this is when the mining cards become obsolete, they won't be able to be used as a graphics card in a computer due to it not being able to output to a display. So realistically it will decrease avaliable graphic card supply to gamers in the future who are maybe looking for a cheap used graphics card (therefore pushing people to buy a new card instead). Short term fix, long term problem. I was th…

There are tons of use cases for GPUs outside of output to a display: audio/video encoding, render farms, scientific computing.

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

#206

Post by balls187 »

HappySweeney wrote: post #41
Alekhine wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It'll be a good opportunity to see some nice hardware hacks, sure. But I'd guess serious miners don't really wanna deal with that shit and will just buy the miner-specific cards or use ASICs. This measure just raises the bar enough to make it a hassle.

Serious miners will go to great lengths to improve their efficiency by even a fraction of 1%. They will absolutely patch some drivers if it gets them better hashes/kwh (which it will or Nvidia wouldn't do this).

Are serious miners buying supply constrained GPUs?

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

#208

Post by smaddox »

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?

Because the value would tank when they tried to sell off all the Bitcoin, etc., that they mined.

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

#209

Post by neither_color »

dheera wrote: post #52
cortesoft wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Their stated purpose is still true. They want to get these GPUs to gamers and their mining GPUs to miners.

I think there are better ways than intentionally crippling a general purpose compute platform. On the surface, the easiest, cheapest way to alleviate the situation would be to require government ID for purchases and limit it to 1 GPU per person, and relax the limitations for educational institutions doing ML research. A more serious way to do it would be to administer a test that you take in person (similar to the DM…

This is what my local microcenter does. They have a sign when you walk in saying ONE gpu per customer per 30 days, and they write down your license number to make sure. I still was never able to get one(because people camp outside the store the night before deliveries) but I appreciate their effort.

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

#210

Post by Zandikar »

rsuttongee wrote: post #194

I mean, the cards are selling at 3-4x MSRP right now. Won’t halving the hash rate just cause the price of the cards to drop to 1.5-2x MSRP and miners just buy twice as many? Possibly good for NVDIA I guess (selling twice the units assuming the can make enough), but I don’t see this helping gamers get cards in hands.

Nope. These are new SKUs (LHR variants), not a patch that retroactively applies to existing stock/sales. If anything, so long as crypto demand persists, this will result in a upward influence on the scalping price of the currently existing non-crippled 3070's and 3080's. Technically Nvidia has existing mining SKU's (their HX skus) so new supply is still entering the market, but its unclear exactly how things will balance out. In the short term (assuming demand remands high for crypto cards), I'd expect scalped pricing to go up, not down. And that's assuming these LHR's arent compromised like the original mining-crippled 3060's have been.
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