Thursday, October 13th 2022
NVIDIA Removes Hashrate Limiter for RTX 30-series LHR GPUs in the Latest Driver
In a last-ditch effort to clear inventory of its GeForce RTX 30-series "Ampere" graphics cards, NVIDIA has reportedly removed the hashrate limiter in the latest GeForce 522.25 drivers, without mentioning it anywhere in the driver's release notes. A Redditor and GeForce RTX 3080 Ti owner by the username "Timbers007" rested that their card, which launched exclusively as LHR-enabled graphics cards (with no RTX 3080 Ti cards without LHR in circulation); is now achieving double its usual hashrates when benchmarked with ethminer. It's able to put out 112 MH/s, a hashrate only possible with mining software that circumvents the LHR limiter, such as NiceHash or NBMiner.
In the thick of the graphics card shortage in 2020-21, as crypto currency miners were buying up inventory of gaming graphics cards through sophisticated retail bots; NVIDIA attempted to sour the milk for miners by introducing LHR (lite hashrate), a supposedly hardware-level limitation that cripples the mining performance of the GPU. This failed to improve things as NVIDIA accidentally released drivers without the hashrate limiter early on and redacted them, but not before they spread among miners. It was only a titanic crash in crypto-currency values, and the recent Ethereum merge that killed GPU-accelerated mining, which arrested demand, bringing RTX 30-series GPUs to prices more acceptable to gamers, as miners began flooding the market with their used GPUs at much lower prices. Will this improve sales of the RTX 30-series? Unlikely. Miners with RTX 30-series LHR graphics cards who already had the hacks to circumvent the limiter, are dumping their cards.
Sources:
VideoCardz, Timbers007 (Reddit)
In the thick of the graphics card shortage in 2020-21, as crypto currency miners were buying up inventory of gaming graphics cards through sophisticated retail bots; NVIDIA attempted to sour the milk for miners by introducing LHR (lite hashrate), a supposedly hardware-level limitation that cripples the mining performance of the GPU. This failed to improve things as NVIDIA accidentally released drivers without the hashrate limiter early on and redacted them, but not before they spread among miners. It was only a titanic crash in crypto-currency values, and the recent Ethereum merge that killed GPU-accelerated mining, which arrested demand, bringing RTX 30-series GPUs to prices more acceptable to gamers, as miners began flooding the market with their used GPUs at much lower prices. Will this improve sales of the RTX 30-series? Unlikely. Miners with RTX 30-series LHR graphics cards who already had the hacks to circumvent the limiter, are dumping their cards.
62 Comments on NVIDIA Removes Hashrate Limiter for RTX 30-series LHR GPUs in the Latest Driver
Lied to customers, crippled performance. Undercutting AIB. Just fair bussiness - nvidia.
The former head of the FTC was a lobbyist, goes without saying it didn't do squat.
It's gotten to the point where it's not only anti-consumer but it's a detriment to the economy at broad. Unfortunately the Supreme Court ruled that federal agencies are not allowed to regulate anything not expressly delegated to them, making it essentially impossible for agencies to act on anything new that pops up.
You have companies in the US routinely cause the death of thousands of Americans for profits and get out of liability with a simple texas two step bankruptcy declaration. If Nvidia does get fined it will be at best a slap on the wrist, at least in the US. EU might actually do something.
Pricing for new cards needs to come down to similar to when 980 and 1080 launched. $550-650.
Long painful road ahead for the industry.
You cannot make GPUs not do a job proper unless you want your fully priced product to be handicapped out of the box.
We already knew it was a driver + firmware level implementation. Since they screwed up once and released a driver without the limiter active ages ago.You seriously overestimate the impact of having the driver monitor for a certain type of compute task. There wouldn't be an extra layer of programming since this would be done by the same driver as everything else. There are most likely at least thousands of other checks for workarounds in the same driver. If there was any performance hit at all, we're talking within margin of error imho.