Friday, February 19th 2021
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
Again, I would hope that they are not this short-sighted, as it will take its toll on the gaming community. They’d be biting the hands that fed them in all those pre-mining years.
Doubt this has any teeth just a PR damage control attempt, driver actually increases mining performance lol
Take gaming GPUs, rewrite the bios and reconfigure the card for the best hash rate at the cheapest relative cost then remove any possibility of gaming on them.
Now the same die capacity that made gaming and enterprise GPU also supply a new special line, that doesn't = more cards for gamer's.
They get the bonus that those mining GPU don't flood and saturate a later market.
They get a pr piece to Sound like they give a shit about gamer's.
They get more direct sales that external monitors see less of.
And where will these restrictions take us next, more segregation likely, and they absolutely Won't increase GPU availability to gamer's.
Nvidia's a troll company to me ATM.
And all while suggesting msrps the Aibs struggle to hit and few really see on a market scalped out of existence, shops only have old ,shit runs a screen type cards that can't feasibly run game's.
It really is like these GPU companies are trolling us gamer's.
Even with all that investment actually happening, the extra supply capacity wouldn't be visible until at least a couple of years down the line.
So, I think the scalper problem will be "mitigated" by upping MSRP in general so as to lower the profit those cretins will get out of it (since there is a limit regarding how much a normal customer is willing to pay for a GPU, a higher MSRP would cut margins for scalpers) and get some more money back to the manufacturing chain. Downside would be obviously us having to pay more even if we manage to find a MSRP-priced card.I'm inclined to agree with you. I don't like this.
No one here has control over the profitability,
Or the MSRP , the companies turned MSRP into a fake FD up selling point often dragged out in pointless arguments not us.
Linus recent video makes me think he's a TPU er like Bret at hotnews , looks like Linus used my earlier post for a script start, in short he agrees.
Nvidia are trolling gamer's asses off with business speak bull that's as transparent as it is commercial in nature.
Doesn't mean this won't help one side of the problem.Goodbye home compute and all the networks that benefitted from it then, I guess?
Scalpers have a different problem. If the card is expensive enough as it is, then customers will be hardly interested in throwing money at it and say "screw it, I'll keep chugging along with my whatever". Which also means scalpers will be sitting on their cards because no one will buy them at a high price inflated even higher.
scalpers will sell and people are still buying and turning to mining in hopes of recovering some, if not all, the additional cost. its a self perpetuating cycle until the coin(s) go bust.
history shows that.
the market is not dependent on how much or what the manufacturer profits - its what people are willing to pay. end of discussion.
We know that Nvidia, or any manufacturer really, doesn't care who buys their products, as long as someone buys them. We also know that the 3060, without this limitation, should be able to crank out a hashrate similar to the 3060Ti, and even the 3070. It sounds to me that Nvidia just wants miners to pay higher prices for more expensive hardware, rather than paying for less expensive hardware that performs similarly to more expensive hardware for this very popular application, all while panting a pretty picture for the gullible masses: hey look gamers, we're saving you from the miners by cutting their hashrate in half!
A better solution would be if the government taxed all cryptocoin at 50% per transaction. Wouldn't have to criminalize it unless people tried to dodge the taxes, but the effact would kill it quick... That would be the better solution. It would be drastic, but effective. Cryptocoin is causing more problems than it solves and it's time to stamp it out.
And then there's the fact that not all bitcoin wallets are properly identified. So it would leave the problem of jurisdiction on the table too.
The entire point of crypto taking off was its USP of being an untaxed and unregulated currency. The only thing your big brained move would do is initiate the creation and move to yet another unregulated crypto -- which take practically no effort to create. It would take the government another several years to take note of it and catch up to it. Again, that's another cat and mouse game you're never going to win. Now allow me to quote your own post from earlier in response:And on that note -- Linus posted a very good video explaining exactly the same things I've already said here multiple times:
I'm sure they test many top games to make sure, but there are thousands of games and applications out there.
And what if I make an application or game where I optimize my code so well that it maximizes the utilization of the GPU and the driver think it's mining? (do I de-optimize my code then?)
I miss those times...
You're not arguing merit anymore, you're arguing ego...
Stop the insults.
Discuss the topic and not each other.
Thank You and Have a Safe Day.
People are already sort of crazy to buy cards with no transferable warranty.