NVIDIA today has officially announced what we have gotten to know through sheer power of will, speculation, and leaks. The company took to a blog post to announce a new, revised lineup of RTX 30-series graphics cards, spanning from the RTX 3060 all the way to the premium RTX 3080 graphics card. All of these will now ship with a new silicon revision (the last 0 has been replaced with a 2, so we're now looking at GA102-202, GA04-302, etc.). LHR effectively halves each of these graphics cards' output in Ethereum mining, which is currently the greatest driver behind mining (and scalping) acquisition of graphics cards.

NVIDIA has also clarified that AIB partners will be clearly labeling their graphics cards with stickers denoting their "LHR" nature, both in the box and card itself, so that customers can know with utmost certainty what they are actually acquiring - though this only applies to newly-manufactured graphics cards, and not to the ones already in the retail channel, for obvious reasons. We are thus looking at a situation where we can find ourselves with two secondary markets for NVIDIA's RTX 30-series cards: one for miners, with non-LHR graphics cards and sold at much-inflated prices, and LHR-cards which should be in keeping with their MSRP - eventually. It remains to be seen whether or not we'll have to cope with yet another scalping arms race for the LHR cards as well, since there is surely a significant market still hungering for the 30-series performance.

GALAX has now become the first NVIDIA partner from whom some details on how NVIDIA's push to limit the mining hash rates on their graphics cards will turn out. The new GALAX graphics cards in question are the already-released, unicorn-like RTX 3070 and RTX 3080. The GALAX packaging doesn't seem to have any differences compared to their original launch packaging for these graphics cards, though; however, the product pages for these respective products do have an additional [FG] compared to the original releases. This seems to be in-line with NVIDIA's decision not to differentiate between LHR and non-LHR cards at a packaging level, so as to reduce desirability for miners to just keep gobbling up remaining supply for the non-LHR graphics cards still in the channel.

As we already knew before, the LHR graphics cards feature an NVIDIA-designed solution that identifies the workload you're putting your card through and artificially halves its performance for Ethereum mining workloads. Of course, NVIDIA would prefer to have miners buying their mining-specific CMP (Crypto Mining Processor) cards and free up demand from their gaming-oriented RTX cards, effectively feeding two very distinct markets. It remains to be seen whether this new NVIDIA hashrate limitation survives more than a few days compared to their latest attempt at such a solution.