Folks, the GTX 1070s 8GB coming with 2017 laptops are still good enough for literally any semi-professional, non-mining application out there, from machine learning to gaming. With a few hacks and the right hardware setup, they can still do not-so-clever professionals happy. Therefore, this is a full supply-demand problem, with Nvidia facing its first, real catch-22 maturity problem: how do they sell new GPUs to happy-with-1070 regulars like me?
Nvidia cripples cryptocurrency mining on RTX 3080 and 3070 cards
381–390 of 818 posts
Re: Nvidia cripples cryptocurrency mining on RTX 3080 and 3070 cards
#382Does 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…
I remember reading about this earlier in the year. What may not be apparent from this article is that Nvida is also selling GPU cards specifically designed for miners.
Re: Nvidia cripples cryptocurrency mining on RTX 3080 and 3070 cards
#383Earlier quoted context omitted.
You realize you're making a moral argument against moral arguments, right? If you'd like to know how people are ok with this, it's been explained plenty already, right here in this discussion.
I think it's just an argument against a unilateral decision by NVIDIA under the facade of morals. Businesses aren't people and don't have morals, everything they do is strategic and profit motivated, even if the people that compose them have morals. My guess is that NVIDIA doesn't want one basket of demand dominating the majority of their demand while disenfranching all of their other demands in parallel computing (g…
Did they do it under a facade of morals? Perhaps you can point me to where Nvidia makes a moral argument.
As an aside, businesses don't act on their own. People do have morals, and they're the ones running things. Whether or not they use their morals is a different question, but we needn't preemptively excuse them from doing so just because money is involved.
Re: Nvidia cripples cryptocurrency mining on RTX 3080 and 3070 cards
#384Is there some merit in comparing this to regulating concert prices? There too one might argue to let the market determine the price, but there too that might lead to a very unequal situation for many, that may eventually backfire.
Re: Nvidia cripples cryptocurrency mining on RTX 3080 and 3070 cards
#385In other news, Nvida has cards specifically designed for professional miners: https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/cmp/
https://hothardware.com/news/msi-cmp-30hx-card-debuts-for-et...
Re: Nvidia cripples cryptocurrency mining on RTX 3080 and 3070 cards
#386Earlier quoted context omitted.
One could argue this is the exact same thing: protecting their long-time customers from a small number of big customers (datacenters) that can afford to dramatically out-price their gamer customers temporarily, but might disappear (if they develop their own hardware?) not too long from now.
I think it's more that Nvidia knows datacenter customers have the money to pay a premium for "datacenter grade" products.
Isn't that kind of the point? If consumers and enterprises were competing for the same product, we would probably see a similar situation as we are with consumers and miners.
Re: Nvidia cripples cryptocurrency mining on RTX 3080 and 3070 cards
#387Earlier quoted context omitted.
Reading the Nvidia announcement it's not a software upgrade, but a change in hardware. It only affects cards made after late May.
I still think it's pretty likely we'll see a work around, but if that work around is a custom made firmware patch (like it was for the driver update they deployed IIRC) then that will probably mean the chips you purchased have a less rosy long term cost as future driver updates won't be applicable to your altered firmware. If it requires any physical tinkering with the chip then it definitely increases the effective…
100% this in the short term, but in the long term workarounds will become harder to find. Have a look at iOS jailbreak history.
I just hope they don’t kill functionality which matters for other meaningful purposes, like deep learning.
Re: Nvidia cripples cryptocurrency mining on RTX 3080 and 3070 cards
#388Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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…
It's not anyone's responsibility to make things "better" for you or anyone else. The person I was replying to said that mining was destroying the planet. This doesn't seem particularly true to me if you're mining on renewables.
Aren't most miners in China and use coal power? Seems like it is contributing to destroying the planet then.
Re: Nvidia cripples cryptocurrency mining on RTX 3080 and 3070 cards
#389Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
This can be just as easier, and probably more truthfully, read as "miners can no longer make the used market a minefield by selling overtaxed consumer cards without disclosing their provenance." Because, yeah, having ex-miner cards burn out is a pretty common thing on the used market. Great! Cryptocurrencies are not inherently good or valuable and cryptocurrency people aren't special and their world-burning habits an…
> Because, yeah, having ex-miner cards burn out is a pretty common thing on the used market.
This is mostly a myth, miners cards are usually undervolted, and only a subset of the card is used.
If your CPU only used it's floating point unit then it wouldn't be as intense as if you were using the whole thing.
The only potential issue is thermal damage, but that's hard to place and has to be close to, or in excess of 90-110c.
Re: Nvidia cripples cryptocurrency mining on RTX 3080 and 3070 cards
#390Earlier quoted context omitted.
As a gamer, I'd much rather they take miner's money for miner's uses and leave me able to play games in my spare time.
I can't believe this is so downvoted. So I, a gaming consumer, have to compete with bots every release because there's so much money in accommodating miner demand for the same cards? That's ridiculous
No, that's arbitrage.