Are they seriously killing their own demand? This is weird
Nvidia cripples cryptocurrency mining on RTX 3080 and 3070 cards
801–810 of 818 posts
Re: Nvidia cripples cryptocurrency mining on RTX 3080 and 3070 cards
#802Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't think PC gaming should require you to be part of the top 10% in order to fairly price computer hardware between mostly foreign miners buying scores of chips whose primary contribution to society is using 129 TW hours annually and individual users buying a single GPU. As a selfish American I would rather we arrange for GPUs to be useless to a small number of users buying a large number of GPUS for mining in or…
Who knows about 10 years in the future; Perhaps crypto '10x's, and gamers move to cloud platforms. If the prices should be raised, after some years, the added margin will add competitors and increase the efficiency, thus making chips cheaper in the long-term. Anyhow, makes more sense to advocate for silicon subsidies, which helps with national geopolitics as well.
I don't want cloud gaming. A NES still works fourty years later, a cloud platform can disappear tomorrow with all your games.
Re: Nvidia cripples cryptocurrency mining on RTX 3080 and 3070 cards
#803Earlier quoted context omitted.
So, you think poor people shouldn't be allowed to play games?
I haven't had a good GPU myself once in my life. I still could play plenty of older games. You're just selfish and entitled.
While I understand why you were downvoted, I think this is a good point.
Re: Nvidia cripples cryptocurrency mining on RTX 3080 and 3070 cards
#804This won't really do anything for availability or reducing scalper pricing. Miners are a sizeable proportion of sales but far from the majority. Gamers will be able to buy more of these GPUs but less of the non-LHR or AMD GPU's. GPU prices won't actually change. The real reason Nvidia is doing this is that when mining profitability inevitably drops, either because of a crypto price crash or Ethereum moving to Proof o…
At the start I thought that miners weren't really a force to reckon with but when I saw that the scalpers are selling their received cards on the same day to miners I changed my opinion. I think people severely underestimate the proportion of miners at this point, overall they aren't a majority but during Q1 2021 they probably were. I'm part of a few botting groups, although I don't take part. The current price difference between the cards can also be partially explained by how much hashpower they have for mining ethereum.
Some back of the envelope math. The current hashrate is about 650000 Gh/s, which is almost 4x as much as at the start of the year. So an increase of about 50000000 Mh/s. A 3060 Ti produces around 60 Mh/s, that's about 8.3 million 3060 Ti's. Of course not all of the added hashpower comes from new cards so the numbers need to be taken with a grain of salt.
Re: Nvidia cripples cryptocurrency mining on RTX 3080 and 3070 cards
#805Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's honestly pretty surprising to me to see how many people on here are supporting this move. That's not what I would expect, I would expect people on HN to object to this move on principle. Maybe my prediction in where most HN commenters stand in principle on this issue is wrong, or just maybe, this is a rare example of a time when the principle (hardware should be free to run at their max capability, not deliberat…
It's been a shift I've noticed over the last ~15(?) years of browsing these and similar forums - as they become more well-known and frequented by the general public, the opinions start to lose nuance and aren't as tightly coupled to the principles from which the forum was borne. Similar example - government regulation of tech: if, 15 years ago, you were to tell a community of Hackers that the EU was planning a massiv…
> Similar example - government regulation of tech: if, 15 years ago, you were to tell a community of Hackers that the EU was planning a massive law to regulate the way you can process data that internet browsers voluntarily send to your server, there would be principled outrage. But, speak ill of GDPR on today's HN, and you'll quickly find yourself inundated with anti-tech talking points.
GDPR is an actual improvement. Silicon Valley overstepped their boundaries and got punished accordingly. Perhaps insufficiently punished, even.
Re: Nvidia cripples cryptocurrency mining on RTX 3080 and 3070 cards
#806Re: Nvidia cripples cryptocurrency mining on RTX 3080 and 3070 cards
#807Earlier quoted context omitted.
They also sometimes do GPU BIOS modifications, which is a fun thing to discover once the card ends up on the second-hand market and you happen to buy one. Luckily the fix is to reflash the BIOS using a matching one from TechPowerUp GPU database, but this assumes that you even know that this is something to pay attention to. Source: happened with an RX 560 that I bought second-hand. Driver installation failed in Windo…
Any idea what they modified?
Usually memory timings, at least on my 5700 XT
Re: Nvidia cripples cryptocurrency mining on RTX 3080 and 3070 cards
#808Earlier quoted context omitted.
Part of that storage problem is what Tesla and Australia did. https://www.greentechmedia.com/articles/read/australia-picks... And there are other approaches to power storage. Thermal power storage is popular / useful with large solar installations. Hydro dams associated with a reservoir often have pumped storage where they can pump water back into the reservoir and then use it when its needed. The signaling and frequ…
I think your last challenges the concept of who exactly is the consumer? Thanks for the thoughtful reply!
Very true. If you're pushing power out onto the grid, you're no longer a consumer but rather a producer and there are other issues that come into play.
Twenty, thirty years ago the amount of power from rooftop installations being pushed out onto the grid was minimal compared to the size of the grid and it wasn't an issue.
If you had an energy producer that was producing 10% of the power and doing significant swings in its production without participating on the wholesale energy market (and not signaling those swings)... the regulators would have shut them down.
But when you've got 10,000 people each contributing 0.001% of the grid power (and all having the same swings)... and not participating on the wholesale market and not signaling their swings, that can be disruptive (and damaging).
https://learn.pjm.com/electricity-basics/market-for-electric... is also a good read and https://www.pjm.com/markets-and-operations.aspx is the live market for that part of the grid.
Re: Nvidia cripples cryptocurrency mining on RTX 3080 and 3070 cards
#809It's likely that this is just a firmware change to the cards and nothing onboard/physically changed at all. If this is the case, then this is hilariously easily defeated by using the firmware updating tool, provided by Nvidia, to get around this. We'll see though. With any luck, they did make physical changes to prevent firmware flashing around this, but I strongly doubt it.
Re: Nvidia cripples cryptocurrency mining on RTX 3080 and 3070 cards
#810This won't really do anything for availability or reducing scalper pricing. Miners are a sizeable proportion of sales but far from the majority. Gamers will be able to buy more of these GPUs but less of the non-LHR or AMD GPU's. GPU prices won't actually change. The real reason Nvidia is doing this is that when mining profitability inevitably drops, either because of a crypto price crash or Ethereum moving to Proof o…
> The real reason Nvidia is doing this is that when mining profitability inevitably drops, either because of a crypto price crash or Ethereum moving to Proof of Stake, the miners will flood the used market and ruin Nvidia's profits for a few quarters. Nvidia is trying to get miners to buy mining-only cards, because those can't be sold to gamers down the line. They'd rather mining cards become e-waste in a few years t…
> Nvidia is trying to get miners to buy mining-only cards, because those can't be sold to gamers down the line.
Afaik Nvidia already tried that [0] but miners didn't really bite because the lack of resale value for those cards cut too much into their profits.