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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

#361

Post by webinvest »

throwaway879 wrote: post #346

Using a made up but probably good enough analogy, if scientist created a blackhole in the lab that could end up sucking in the entire planet and the solar system, would it be OK for someone to jam the mechanism that sustains it? I think of PoW gambling casinos slash Ponzi schemes (Bitcoin) in the same way. If the governments don't have any motivation to stop the mayhem, then the company whose products are being used…

I can’t blame you for using a throwaway account for a comment like that. Many cryptocurrencies provide value while video games suck time and value.

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

#362

Post by willhinsa »

saurik wrote: post #151
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?

While having the cards is tablestakes, and newer cards can do more for less, in the end--even for Ethereum--you really still are spending more on electricity than hardware, and so you can have all the cards in the world and still not be able to mine crypto effectively. Most mining is thereby done in other places in the world where the externalities on power generation and use (clean or dirty, both) are less well trac…

With today’s ETH prices, electricity costs are a fraction of the revenue from mining. Like, on the order of less than 10%.

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

#363

Post by lazide »

mrb wrote: post #320
Justsignedup wrote: post #254

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To add on: none of it is malicious. its just the market stabalization problem a) let's keep consumer grade stuff stable in price b) let's charge miners 3x, because they willing to pay 3x, and destroy the scalping market which is VERY anti everything. Scalpers hurt literally everyone. c) let's not de-stabalize nvidia's income again when eth drops in value. They don't want to be beholden to a coin's gamble either. Basi…

c) is nonsense. There are no downsides to a temporary boost in Nvidia's profits, even if it means profits eventually falling back to normal levels when ETH drops in value. Also, LHR (gaming) GPUs and CMP (mining) GPUs share the exact same supply chain and components. When/if crypto demand suddenly drops, Nvidia will still have to deal with the oversupply of components. Having segmented the market between LHR and CMP…

It is a real risk when gamers (the every day bread and butter) or ML model folks (emerging bread and butter) markets will stop using them because they can’t get reliable supply. Both of those groups do quite a lot of driver validation, workload tuning, and other platform specific stuff. If another competitor gets those markets, that will hurt for a long time.

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

#364

Post by tshaddox »

ALittleLight wrote: post #328
tshaddox wrote: post #297

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, you could just say that your “principles” are simply the entire exact sequence of actions you take in your life. That way you could by definition never change or violate your principles. But usually people use “principle” to refer to a relatively concise statement that can be applied to a large variety of situations.

I'm not familiar with any definition of the word principle that includes the idea of "concise". Principle as I'm using it here is a moral belief or guide. It's less a description of what you do and more an explanation for why you do what you do.

I just mean that it must be more concise than a lookup table from every possible situational input to the recommended output. The same is implied by the term “explanation.”

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

#365

Post by Const-me »

I have mixed feelings about that.

I’d like to replace 1080Ti with 3080, but miners priced me out.

I wonder how exactly nVidia is doing that? I do little integer ops on my GPUs, but I do a lot of FP64 ones. Just like these integer Ethereum hashes, FP64 is not used by videogames much.

If nVidia does that performance throttling by detecting some patterns in the code, looking for Ethereum miners, AV-style — pretty sure Ethereum miners will find a workaround soon. These AV-style code detectors are unreliable by design.

If nVidia does that by crippling specific low-level instructions, this gonna slow down innovation rate for everyone. Not just for me with my niche FP64 CAD/CAE workloads, for games too.

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

#366

Post by orangecat »

Justsignedup wrote: post #254
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…

To add on: none of it is malicious. its just the market stabalization problem a) let's keep consumer grade stuff stable in price b) let's charge miners 3x, because they willing to pay 3x, and destroy the scalping market which is VERY anti everything. Scalpers hurt literally everyone. c) let's not de-stabalize nvidia's income again when eth drops in value. They don't want to be beholden to a coin's gamble either. Basi…

Scalpers hurt literally everyone.

They help people who are willing to pay the higher prices, and they provide a market signal encouraging producers to increase output.

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

#367

Post by joe_the_user »

knz_ wrote: post #322
joe_the_user wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think this is "recognizing customers", I think this is just sectioning markets. I'd dreading Nvidia crippling deep learning for all those not paying X more dollars (as the situation already is for server farms). Long term, the aim has to be selling cards by usage rather than by cost of production (obvious with the aim of prices higher than the cost of production by different amounts). How many people like Ado…

> I'd dreading Nvidia crippling deep learning for all those not paying X more dollars (as the situation already is for server farms). This already changed years ago when NVIDIA removed the last non-crippled double and half precision GPUs from their product lineup. The cheapest GPU you can buy for ML now is the titan v, which was $3000 at launch.

I'm only planning at this point - so I don't know but am very interested. I see the RTX 3080 reviewed as the most cost effective chip you can get for deep learning. I have the impression a lot of research is moving to lower precision also.

https://timdettmers.com/2020/09/07/which-gpu-for-deep-learni...

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

#368

Post by godelski »

babypuncher wrote: post #337
godelski wrote: post #306

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It was eye-opening to see Cyberpunk running almost perfectly on DAY ONE with the same performance as Windows. I'm looking at Cyberpunk right now (because it is on sale) and Steam says it is windows only. Most of my Steam library doesn't work on linux, what are you running differently? I'm only just getting back into games after a long hiatus.

Windows-only games can run on the Linux version of Steam using a feature built into the app called Steam Play, which allows games to be run on unsupported platforms using compatibility layers. Steam comes bundled with the Proton compatibility tool, a fork of Wine maintained by Valve. It has very high compatibility, as long as you aren't looking to play competitive multiplayer titles. Here's a community maintained com…

Thanks!!!! I found the option. I've heard great things about proton just didn't realize I had to flip a switch.

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

#369

Post by fay59 »

IncRnd wrote: post #234
fay59 wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I absolutely despise cryptocurrency, so this may not be accurate, but my understanding is that they’re only reliable if many independent people mine. If NVIDIA kept all its GPUs and mined Bitcoin instead of selling them, it could control more than 50% of the hashing capacity. This could allow NVIDIA to double-spend bitcoins, the possibility of which would probably crash confidence in the asset.

Are you saying that GPUs are now competitive with ASICs when mining bitcoin?

I have no idea what people use to mine cryptocurrency these days and quite frankly I would rather it all stop, so no, I’m not saying that.

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

#370

Post by loeg »

bentcorner wrote: post #261
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…

How big is the used market for graphics cards though? Common advice is to avoid buying used unless you also price in the risk that the card was used as a miner and hasn't been taken care of. Aside from the recent drought of GPUs and pricing madness, you could buy low-end current-gen cards that could outperform higher-end previous-gen parts.

My most recent card purchase was used. I bought a used GTX 1070 for $230 in 2019, when the 2000-series was new. I've been happy with the price and performance; it hasn't died or anything.

> Aside from the recent drought of GPUs and pricing madness, you could buy low-end current-gen cards that could outperform higher-end previous-gen parts.

This wasn't true at the time. The high-end parts just have many multiples of the compute units of the low end cards. Nvidia 3xxx isn't 100% faster than 2xxx or 1xxx on a per-unit basis, and the x080 cards have several times the compute of the x030 or 50 parts.

Another relevant concern is GPU RAM; the lower end parts just have less RAM. Game performance completely falls over if more RAM is needed than the card has. Very large displays need a ton of GPU RAM.

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