Friday, February 19th 2021
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NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3060 Anti-Mining Feature Goes Beyond Driver Version, Could Expand to More SKUs
Yesterday NVIDIA announced the company's first Crypto Mining Processor (CPM) that serves the purpose of having a dedicated processor only for mining with no video outputs. Alongside the new processors, the company has also announced that in the next driver update the GeForce RTX 3060 GPU will get Etherium mining performance halved, limiting the use of this GPU SKU by miners. However, up until now, we have thought that NVIDIA is limiting the mining performance of this card by simply having a driver detect if crypto mining algorithms are in place and limit the performance. However, that doesn't seem to be the case. According to Bryan Del Rizzo, director of global PR for GeForce, more things are working behind the driver.
According to Mr. Del Rizzo: "It's not just a driver thing. There is a secure handshake between the driver, the RTX 3060 silicon, and the BIOS (firmware) that prevents removal of the hash rate limiter." This means that essentially, NVIDIA can find any way to cripple the mining hash rate even if you didn't update your driver version. At the same time, according to Kopite7Kimi, we are possibly expecting to see NVIDIA relaunch its existing SKUs under a different ID, which would feature a built-in anti-crypto mining algorithm. What the company does remains to be seen.
Sources:
Bryan Del Rizzo (Twitter), @kopite7kimi (Twitter) #1, @kopite7kimi (Twitter) #2, via VideoCardz
According to Mr. Del Rizzo: "It's not just a driver thing. There is a secure handshake between the driver, the RTX 3060 silicon, and the BIOS (firmware) that prevents removal of the hash rate limiter." This means that essentially, NVIDIA can find any way to cripple the mining hash rate even if you didn't update your driver version. At the same time, according to Kopite7Kimi, we are possibly expecting to see NVIDIA relaunch its existing SKUs under a different ID, which would feature a built-in anti-crypto mining algorithm. What the company does remains to be seen.
104 Comments on NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3060 Anti-Mining Feature Goes Beyond Driver Version, Could Expand to More SKUs
If nothing else, they should hopefully see how the gaming market NEEDS a good supply of GPUs. Without it, the market could see some serious pain if people can’t even find a proper GPU to game on. Hopefully that is the intent of such an initiative, and it’s not just an attempt to take advantage of the market conditions.
It's really not that complicated.
I am concerned about how this may affect compute though. Like legit compute.
This isn't a "We love Gamers" move that some here think it is. This is all about more money now (from miners), and more money later (from gamers) when used mining cards can't be gamed with.
I remain skeptical.
Just stupid. The cards do it well, it will be done. Simple.
I'll be using my card for a dam long time.
Then again, this may all be moot as there seem to be report that all it disables is the ETH one and there seem to be other coins that can be mined almost as profitably as ETH thus completely circumvening all of this charade.
The only thing they can do is to have a sort of "black list" of certain instruction sequences, but the wider this is, the more false positives they will get, and the narrower, the easier it is to work around. Either way, this is a bad idea, possibly the worst they've ever had.
It will be like the oscilloscope market: You buy an expensive scope which is software crippled to a fraction of it's performance and you have to pay a lot extra to unlock it. It kind of makes sense for a consumer market also, so I would expect for this to become a new way of capitalizing hardware as soon as the software locks are robust enough. Mining locks might be a good test bed, since the mining community has a lot of incentive to find ways around it.