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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

#91

Post by PragmaticPulp »

willis936 wrote: post #36
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…

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 reasonable price than a fully unlocked card that can't be obtained for anything less than 3X MSRP.

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

#92

Post by drexlspivey »

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…

> increasing the consumption of energy which is at the core of the problem.

How is consuming energy a problem? There is a blob of infinite energy on the sky and practically all of it is wasted.

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

#93

Post by justaguy88 »

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…

Graphics cards without display outputs are still useful, you can use them for VFIO and gpgpu workloads

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

#94

Post by levesque »

smiley1437 wrote: post #69
skytreader wrote: post #18

Total hardware noob here. How do they do it? Is there a particular instruction that ETH needs to be "efficient" but games can live with throttled? Or perhaps a sequence of instructions that's signature to ETH?

From what I've read, the card detects if it has been continuously mining for 30 minutes then throttles itself.

Going to be fun to see cases of false positives. "Help! My FPS drops 75% after running game for 30 minutes!"

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

#95

Post by erjiang »

ericmay wrote: post #21
Grimm1 wrote: post #15

Can't drive people to the mining cards they've released if you have everyone using the consumer hardware. As someone who really likes the performance and ecosystem around NVIDIA cards this makes me happy, because I'll probably be able to own one sometime before the heat death of the universe if trends like this continue. But, "To help get GeForce GPUs in the hands of gamers," Is a load of crock. They have a new minin…

Can't it be both? Seems like a win-win for Nvidia and gamers. I can genuinely see a company like Nvidia getting a lot of customer feedback and maybe employees actually caring that gamers can get their hands on Nvidia's cards.

It makes sense to me that gamers as a market are more likely to be brand-loyal and gaming is also more moat-able than hashing.

For miners, they just want whatever does more hashes per second. There's no loyalty there and the hardware is competing solely on hash/power/cost. For gaming, you have proprietary software and APIs like "RTX"-branded stuff, game-specific driver optimizations, etc. where you can better defend yourself against AMD.

So for Nvidia, if they're going to sell X GPUs either way, they'd rather sell to gamers than miners to help preserve their gaming market share which plausibly has more long-term value. Just my guess, at least.

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

#96

Post by alert0 »

skytreader wrote: post #18

Total hardware noob here. How do they do it? Is there a particular instruction that ETH needs to be "efficient" but games can live with throttled? Or perhaps a sequence of instructions that's signature to ETH?

Speculation having thought about this for a few minutes a few weeks ago. Given that a driver update disabled the feature, my guess is that they have certain kernels blacklisted. Really just the anti-virus equivalent of if (e.g.) Nicehash Miner, set throttle. A good way to test this would be to write a new miner and see what perf you can get.

I have the driver with it disabled and would patch diff it against a new one if I had the time, but I'm very busy with work. It would be an interesting problem of binary diffing at scale (dozens of libraries). Very interested if anyone has any insight.

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

#97

Post by PragmaticPulp »

arthurcolle wrote: post #39
belltaco wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The extra power usage is destroying our planet all for someone to try and make a quick buck, and causing shortages of GPUs during a pandemic where mental health from entertainment like gaming is valuable and stops people from going outside and getting/spreading the virus. The incentives for crypto all are f'ed up right now. The ETH PoS switch can't come soon enough.

So earning income is less important than letting people play video games? Let's just say I'm unconvinced by this argument.

I don't know any gamers who can game 24/7, 7 days a week with multiple GPUs.

Mining and gaming aren't even close to comparable in power usage.

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

#98

Post by oh_sigh »

pdimitar wrote: post #88

I never planned to mine cryptocurrency but such a move sends a very bad message to me as an end user. Fine, NVIDIA. I planned to have a dedicated Win10 gaming PC with an RTX 3090 and a separate Linux workstation but I guess it's better if I just get the Threadripper Pro workstation and equip it with an AMD 6900XT and do both my work and gaming under Linux. Will spend 40-50% less money, too. And Steam is getting bette…

Why would them diminishing a certain aspect that you admittedly never planned on using in the first place affect your decision? Does your work involve computing millions of hashes, but isn't cryptocurrency?

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

#99

Post by dorkwood »

seneca wrote: post #16
creato wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is unfortunate, but it is less unfortunate than the behavior of crypto miners. Freedom is great when people aren't using their freedom to infringe on other people's freedom.

> Freedom is great when people aren't using their freedom to infringe on other people's freedom. Other people driving up the price on something you want is not "[infringing] on other people's freedom". It's an inconvenience, but you're still completely free to buy at the inflated price.

Could the price ever reach a point where you would say it infringes on the general public's freedom to purchase? Or are all prices simply greater and greater inconveniences?

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

#100

Post by mdoms »

capableweb wrote: post #65
tshaddox wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What worth is a principle if you don't still have it when it get challenged? Huh? To me, refusing to even acknowledge or entertain criticism for one’s principles is one of the worst things I can imagine. Principles ought to be routinely subjected to criticism, no different than scientific theories.

> refusing to even acknowledge or entertain criticism I'm not advocating for you not listen to criticism aimed towards your principle. But if your principle gets put to the test and you abandon it, it's no longer something you fundamentally agree on, it was some "light belief" that you had.

This is nonsense. Principles should adapt to the context they're applied in. In principle I'm against big government intervention into our personal lives, but you bet your ass I'm in favour of lockdowns when thousands of lives are at stake. I'm not going to let thousands of my compatriots die out of principle.
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