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Nvidia announces mining GPUs, cuts the hash rate of RTX-3060 in half
- protoman3000 6y agoThis doesn’t change anything, as the additional yield by reusing binned chips is not enough to meet inelastic demand from miners. They will buy anything
- sneak 6y agoIt's a real shame that companies think that they should be the ones dictating how you use a piece of hardware you bought from them. It's a further shame that they would artificially hinder their hardware for such purposes. I will avoid nvidia in the future as a result of this sort of attitude, and I don't even mine cryptocurrency. I have no dog in this race other than a philosophical one.
- ComodoHacker 6y agoIt's easy to speak philosophically when you have no dog in the race. It's harder when you need a GPU for other tasks and have to pay the crypto tax.
- xtracto 6y agoNo. They (nvidia or someone else) should be building tons and tons of cards for the existing demand. I just cant understand why isnt someone salivating at such market inefficiency.
- dixego 6y agoA thought just occurred to me: is there an upper limit to how much computing power (and energy) cryptocurrency mining can reasonably use? Or could all computer hardware be repurposed to mine crypto and there would still be demand for more hardware?
- unmasked_poker 6y agoUsually the amount of crypto that can be mined in a given time frame is limited. So you could buy more hardware, but it would not be profitable.
- rrss 6y agobecause building 8nm semiconductor fabs is slightly harder than setting up a lemonade stand.
- dahart 6y agoThey did exactly that just 3 years ago when bitcoin was hot, and (when bitcoin crashed) ended up with an oversupply of GTX cards that delayed Turing sales and tanked the stock for a while. https://www.tomshardware.com/news/nvidia-cryptocurrency-earnings-1060-2060,38083.html https://www.tomshardware.com/news/nvidia-cryptocurrency-earn...
- Nullabillity 6y agoDoesn't really make sense to blame Turing's sales on this when it was also a pretty bad generation in general (price hikes, poor performance, RTX gimmick turned out to be a flop).
- sneak 6y agoThere is no "crypto tax", just supply and demand. I recently bought a NIB 3090 (secondhand, because nvidia are in denial of reality apparently) for gaming and video production.
- blibble 6y agothe vast majority of their customers will happily give up crypto-mining for the chance to buy a card at a reasonable price (... assuming the miners can't trivially patch to the drivers to re-enable the functionality)
- vsareto 6y agoNvidia is in a "tough" spot. If they increased GPU prices to take advantage of miner demand, they could be rich but lose the gaming segment. If they keep the price accessible for gaming, then they end up dealing with scalpers and low availability which, fair or not, impacts their brand. This is really an attempt to get the miners to buy something else so they can have both market segments.
- sneak 6y agoSegmentation has always left a bad taste in my mouth. I had to buy my 3090 (for gaming and video production) secondhand NIB because nvidia was playing dumb with prices. And don't get me started on DVD region locks.
- WrtCdEvrydy 6y agoSupport working hardware in the future (AMD)
- trynumber9 6y agoit is annoying they limit their drivers this way but ultimately this is in response to their core customers' frustrations. Nvidia is trying to segment their products so that the video game market can get their cards without dealing with the boom and bust cycle of cryptomining. I somehow doubt these drivers will be enough to stop it, however.
- dannyw 6y agoGimp the memory bandwidth, that'll do it.
- glennpratt 6y agoThat will also hurt games. It's a huge differentiator between integrated GPUs and dedicated.
- thefz 6y agoThe real shame is allowing scalpers to run their stock dry and generating this problem.
- sneak 6y agoScalpers do not alter supply or demand. What, to you, is the difference between a scalper and a dealer?
- thefz 6y agoDealers resell with a small margin hoping there's enough demand for them to turn a profit. Scalpers aggressively create demand by buying every single card on the market and then reselling at an enormous, many times the original cost, markup. There is a huge difference.
- sneak 6y ago> Scalpers aggressively create demand Scalpers do not create demand.
- ENOTTY 6y agothere’s going to be a brisk market in reverse engineering the drivers and getting around this “RTX 3060 software drivers are designed to detect specific attributes of the Ethereum cryptocurrency mining algorithm, and limit the hash rate, or cryptocurrency mining efficiency, by around 50 percent.”
- varispeed 6y agoIf you cannot run what you want on the device, do you really own it?
- bryanlarsen 6y agoIf you cannot buy it because miners have purchased all the stock, do you really own it?
- varispeed 6y agoNot sure how this is relevant. Company should look how to increase the supply instead of artificially crippling the product to squeeze more money.
- bryanlarsen 6y agoBy crippling the product for miners, they're increasing the supply for gamers.
- asutekku 6y agoIf it is not physically possible, this decision makes a lot of sense. Due to the global semiconductor shortage it simply is not possible to build more on the scale customers would like to.
- cybrexalpha 6y agoHave nvidia lost their minds? It's going to take days for mining operations to reverse-engineer the driver and undo this. So commercial operations won't be affected at all. Worse, their detection isn't going to be 100% perfect. What if After Effects does something that looks "kind of" like mining. Is it just going to be crippled? What will nvidia do then? Suggest I buy a Quadro for AE support? This will only penalise average users.
- WrtCdEvrydy 6y agoYeah, this is about par for the course for Nvidia. I wish AMD had a working product to kick their teeth in...
- kmeisthax 6y agoThey mostly do, the problem is that they're even more supply-constrained than Nvidia right now.
- COGlory 6y agoThey do. The 5700XT is still an excellent card, the 6700 and 6700XT are coming out soon, and the 6800 and 6800XT are both absolutely killer cards as well, especially at the reference prices. Vendors and demand have effectively driven prices to an insane amount, and you just can't get them, unfortunately. Short of AMD doing something like Nvidia is doing here, I doubt we'll see them on store shelves any time soon.
- phendrenad2 6y agoIt'll be interesting to see how long it takes for someone to reverse-engineer the drivers and remove the slowdown code.
- tux3 6y agoI'm sure someone raised that objection internally, and was pointedly ignored (as they should be if all you care about is the PR angle of "we're doing something"!)
- notum 6y agoOr. Uhm. Use older drivers? I bet these are bios changes though.
- hn8788 6y agoThe RTX 3060 hasn't released yet, so if the cards ship with this limitation, there aren't any old drivers to use.
- notum 6y agoYou're right, I forgot they package up drivers for all cards in the same versioning scheme, so using 4XX version of the package won't support the card.
- qqii 6y agoI don't speak Russian but this video suggests otherwise: https://youtu.be/282Ozbp-Uv8?t=262 https://youtu.be/282Ozbp-Uv8?t=262
- nuccy 6y agoI use CUDA for scientific calculations and I wonder how this will affect GPU performance since any detection algorithm may have fault positives. The only problem with such artificial limitation is that usually people who mine crypto are very inventive (if you have doubts about that just check laptop mining farms [1]), since they try to squeeze out as many H/s as possible. It is just a matter of time when the 'right' driver will be available. 1. https://www.notebookcheck.net/Nvidia-GeForce-RTX-3060-laptops-from-Hasee-snapped-up-by-the-hundreds-for-a-single-crypto-mining-farm-in-China-as-business-booms.519605.0.html https://www.notebookcheck.net/Nvidia-GeForce-RTX-3060-laptop...
- serverholic 6y agoWow nVidia really needs some serious competition.
- TomVDB 6y agoIndeed. We can only hope that AMD implements a similar slowdown.
- serverholic 6y agoWhy shouldn't people be allowed to use their GPUs how they want?
- TomVDB 6y agoWhy shouldn't companies be allowed to do product segmentation? Limiting mining performance on a consumer GPU is no different than limiting certain professional or machine learning specific performance features.
- serverholic 6y agoThis isn't about product segmentation. They're artificially neutering their product. It's perfectly fine to offer a different product that's designed for better performance but to artificially limit product A so that people are forced to buy product B (that's probably more expensive) is messed up.
- TomVDB 6y agoMicrosoft designed Office with professional features, but they artificially neuter the Home version with a compile switch. This is no different. As long as you know what you're paying for, segmentation is fine. It allows consumers to pay for what they need.
- theandrewbailey 6y agoAside from AMD, there really isn't anyone competing on high-end mass market PC GPUs. Intel is making some moves, but nothing has been released yet. https://www.tomshardware.com/news/intel-xe-hpg-graphics-unveiled https://www.tomshardware.com/news/intel-xe-hpg-graphics-unve...
- Thaxll 6y agoGamers hate miners, they're driving the price up, make hardware impossible to get ect ... It's a really problematic situation. Almost 6 month after launching new graphic cards from AMD / NVIDIA good luck gettting an RTX 30xx or 6800. On a side note all those virtual currency are just plain wrong on the environment side, it does not make any sense in 2021 to have a currency that need heavy computation thus increasing power consumption. When people designed those currency they def did not think about that.
- serverholic 6y agoThis is why Ethereum is moving to proof-of-stake. Saying that virtual currency is wrong because the biggest currency is unwilling to innovate is wrong.
- striking 6y agoWhen?
- lima 6y agoThe beacon chain - the first step in the transition - has already launched: https://beaconcha.in/ https://beaconcha.in/
- jki275 6y agoNever. They've been "moving to proof of stake" for something like three years. The miners are making money off of them not moving to proof of stake. The miners stop making money when they move to proof of stake. The only people who can actually allow the chain to move to proof of stake are the miners. Meanwhile, xtz and ada have been proof of stake since their inception, 3+ years already for both.
- hobofan 6y agoI mean I'm also disappointed by the slow pace of the transition, but they are clearly making progress towards it. They've been _planning_ to move to PoS for ~3 years, with a much too optimistic timeline. In the meantime a lot of companies working towards that have collapsed or refocused on other efforts, delaying the whole transition. It will probably take another ~3 years (my personal estimate) until the transition is reasonably finished and core parts of the ecosystems have migrated, but at least it's moving into the right direction.
- supernes 6y agoGimping their products through software is very on-brand for NVIDIA, gotta admit.
- eugene3306 6y agobut how will it affect ML applications?
- dekken_ 6y agoThis should be illegal
- nsxwolf 6y agoWhy? You can always make your own GPU.
- rrss 6y agoA product performs worse at some stuff than it might have in a hypothetical reality, and it says so on the box. What should be illegal about this, and why?
- dekken_ 6y agoI suppose I'm free to not buy it. As for a reason, why should they be able to dictate what the hardware they release is used for?
- ed25519FUUU 6y agoSo they’re hamstringing normal cards (to protect gamers of course!) and releasing a “new” card without the hamstring at a higher price and we’re to believe this is simply to protect gamers and not a money grab?
- namdnay 6y agoIt's a seller's market at the moment, so an easier "cash grab" would just be to increase the price of the base card to the higher price. No, I think the belief is that they need to keep at least a minimal base of support among gamers and developers, for when the inevitable crypto crash comes and they need to go back to their original customer base
- rrss 6y agoWouldn't the easy money grab be to just set MSRP for all cards way higher ($5k?) while the demand is ~infinite?
- shawnz 6y ago> Wouldn't the easy money grab be to just set MSRP for all cards way higher But then how do they capture the "just gamers"? They would have to additionally sell a neutered card just for them, and that is exactly what they are doing here
- christkv 6y ago1.2.3 Class action lawsuit.
- namdnay 6y agoClass action lawsuit relative to a product that isn't sold yet? What next, class action lawsuit against Apple when they announce the next iphone won't have any external ports?
- moralestapia 6y agoI agree GP's argument is a bit exaggerated, but this would be more akin to Apple announcing "we will no longer let you play music from XXX". IANAL but maybe there's grounds for a lawsuit on that.
- christkv 6y agoDuh for some reason I already thought it was on the market. Yeah as long as it's clearly stated I imagine its fine. I guess the 3080 and 3070 will become even more premium.
- notum 6y agoI hate that I wasn't able to get a 30x series because miners grabbed them. I hate that my preorder was canceled by the supplier on the day it was supposed to ship, just because a farm had a better price. But guess what Nvidia? I no longer want your products. As much as I may dislike the fact crypto is affecting gaming (rendering, machine learning...) I can't help but ask: Who in the holy F are you to tell me what to do with my product? I take it back actually, I'll buy one to use instead of toilet paper. Fix THAT with a bios update.
- thefz 6y ago> Who in the holy F are you to tell me what to do with my product? It is the same with hardware video encode, RTX cards are locked up to 2x streams at maximum while they are in most cases capable of many, many more (i.e. Plex transcodes). Not that this is an issue though, since it's a driver lock with a working fix.
- jki275 6y agoI suspect there will be a bios fix for this lock about a day after they're released. Unless they put this in hardware somehow, it's not going to be effective. And, they mention the ETH algorithm specifically is what they detect -- there are a bunch of other algorithms that aren't ETH that are profitable to mine.
- notum 6y agoChrist I had no idea. I beg to differ, it's a HUGE issue.
- my123 6y agoSame thing for ECC being disabled on customer GPUs. And ECC disabled on customer Intel CPUs and AMD Ryzen APUs. (AMD is quite sneaky there, non-Pro CPUs have ECC but non-Pro APUs don’t). Market segmentation is a usual thing on the computer market.
- DennisP 6y agoIt's probably not even necessary. They're also introducing a card that removes everything not needed for mining. Unless they're overpricing that card, it will be more cost-effective for miners and outcompete the gamer cards.
- tmaly 6y agoWhy not just make a massively parallel ASIC and make the price competitive to the RTX 3060? This would be better than crippling the product via software drivers.
- terramex 6y agoThe big draw of gaming cards is their resale value, when they become obsolete for mining they can be resold to gamers for significant fraction of their original price. Truly huge mining operations use ASICs anyway, but for medium sized farms gaming GPUs make more sense.
- throwaway2a02 6y agoMy understanding is that the ETH and other algorithms designed to be run on GPUs have big memory and memory bandwidth requirements, which is what makes it more difficult (or less cost effective?) to implement on an ASIC. LE. I see you meant NVidia should be making the ASICs. In that case, that's exactly what they're doing, isn't it? This CMP line is exactly that.
- julienfr112 6y agoethereum was especialy designed to be mined with gpu, i think asic or fpga will miss the memory size that gpu have.
- jarenmf 6y agoThey are only doing that to promote their new NVIDIA CMP HX product line
- ralmidani 6y agoI would normally be appalled by such an action, but the supply issues for RTX 30x0 cards are beyond ridiculous. Mining trashes the environment and, for the majority of crypto assets/volumes, does not provide genuinely valuable economic activity besides speculation (I say that as someone who has put thousands of dollars into crypto in the past). Why should people who want to try some ML/DL at home (maybe they even need it for a class they're taking), and might also want to play the occasional game, have to pay an arm and a leg to get their (remaining) hands on a modern, efficient card? I really wish Nvidia would do this across the RTX product line. Edit: the "Syrian refugee crossing into Europe" trope might pop up as a counter-argument for crypto. I am Syrian and still have relatives there. Refugees' assets are a drop in the ocean of speculators' mining and HODLing.
- Tenoke 6y ago> I really wish Nvidia would do this across the RTX product line. I'd rather they have scaled up the demand. They've had years of this to take the higher profits and invest them. Even if people don't use them for mining, the demand for Machine Learning is there - instead GeForce cards have been banned for use in data centers for years. Not to mention that the crippling of 3060 would be trivial for mining operations to get around.
- ralmidani 6y agoI understand Nvidia is no angel. And I'm totally OK with them doing the right thing for the wrong reason. Also, my concern is not for data centers running creepy ML models that invade users' privacy, but for the average home user who wants to get started with ML and at the same time get decent frame rates when they play a game.
- Tenoke 6y ago>I understand Nvidia is no angel. And I'm totally OK with them doing the right thing for the wrong reason. My argument is they should and could have scaled up the production rather than just shuffling around which group they hurt or help at the expense of which other (be it miners, ML folks or gamers). This isn't the 'right thing', it just helps the group you prefer on this round.
- lrossi 6y agoGreat, another company that is dictating what software I am running on the computer I own. I’ve never mined Ethereum, but this really upsets me.
- adamdusty 6y agoThen get literally any other Nvidia card?
- NKosmatos 6y agoI agree, when you buy the hardware you should be able to do what you please with it. This applies for something you already own and use. Imagine a new driver, for hardware you already own where you couldn't watch cat videos (extreme example) in 4K but only in 360p :-) On the other hand if you're well informed before buying such a card, that it will have reduced performance for crypto (or whatever) I guess it's ok and you can select something else. We have to be realistic here and understand that on one hand NVIDIA hates miners since they're creating a shortage of cards for gamers but on the other hand they're the ones buying all new cards straight away for mining. I think this is a marketing trick so that both gamers and miners are happy, RTX line for gamers and CMP line for miners, win-win for NVIDIA :-)
- dividedbyzero 6y ago> I think this is a marketing trick so that both gamers and miners are happy, RTX line for gamers and CMP line for miners, win-win for NVIDIA :-) But they won't magically have twice the amount of chips on hand, will they? So either they make a lot of CMP cards and too little RTX cards, and gamers will still struggle to get one, or they'll make sufficient RTX cards and too few CMP ones and miners have a big incentive to get around those restrictions (and will, in all likelihood). I guess they can mark up those CMP cards and include some mining-friendly features in the future for some additional revenue.
- Uke 6y agoThis could be the win-win-win for all parties, if only the cuda cores on the die have to be known good, it could mean, that the yield of nvidia goes up, gamers get their gpus with graphics, and miners get a card that can mine for a limited amount of time but then can't go into secondary market.
- protoman3000 6y agoAs I wrote in the other thread here, this won’t change anything. The additional chips which were previously binned probably don’t exceed demand. The demand of miners is inelastic and they will buy anything.
- the-enterprise 6y ago(1) Many gamers are miners in their spare time! (2) Big Mining operations actually write their own drivers (3) Huge Mining operations even use custom boards (4) I heard that that Nvidia has been selling silicon directly to the big boys (https://wccftech.com/nvidia-allegedly-sold-175-million-worth-ampere-geforce-rtx-30-gpus-to-miners/ https://wccftech.com/nvidia-allegedly-sold-175-million-worth...) (5) With this action I expect its only the little guys getting removed from the game here (1) a huge benefit for the big players (2)(3) benefitting the corporations biggest customers (4)
- lima 6y agoThe objective seems to be to stop miners from buying up consumer GPUs. Nvidia added a separate product line for mining.
- wmf 6y agoIf both those product lines use the same dies, mining is still taking GPUs away from gamers.
- _carbyau_ 6y agoAssuming binning is simply making use of chips that fail display output tests but are otherwise fine, then I see no issue here. These are chips not being used by gamers anyway. I am curious though whether they could be used as "second cards" for systems so that I can speed up Blender render times...
- the-enterprise 6y agoThe point made is this will stop mass consumers mining, any restriction will likely be quickly bypassed by those technical enough to bypass it. This is a great video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sg__YdXbRtI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sg__YdXbRtI
- TomVDB 6y ago> (2) Big Mining operations actually write their own drivers Strong claims require strong evidence.
- Tenoke 6y agoThis is from the company that previously brought you 'No GeForce in data centers'.
- yuhong 6y agoEven back then there was an exception for "blockchain processing".
- ThePhysicist 6y agoIn Germany, NVIDIA quotes 519 € as the starting price for the RTX 3070 series. Unfortunately, the cards are sold out almost everywhere and the few sites that accept back-orders list them for almost 1.000 € now, which is crazy. So Kudos to them for doing this, as the crypto craze seems to heat up there's no end in sight for miners buying up GPUs and NVIDIA risks angering a lot of regular people that weren't able to buy a new graphics card for almost 6 months now. That said I'm not sure how effective this measure will be as in my understanding all that miners need to do in order to circumvent this throttling is avoid downloading the newest NVIDIA drivers (?). In addition, I'm sure miners will quickly come up with a crack that renders the throttling moot, so not sure if this will fix the supply side. Offering specific hardware to miners that doesn't compete with that for gamers seems to be a better solution, but again if NVIDIA isn't able to satisfy the demand for such hardware miners will keep buying regular GPUs and try to circumvent the software throttling.
- Tenoke 6y ago> So Kudos to them for doing this I'd rather they have scaled up the demand. They've had years of this to take the higher profits and invest them. Even if people don't use them for mining, the demand for Machine Learning is there - instead GeForce cards have been banned for use in data centers for years. Not to mention that the crippling of 3060 would be trivial for mining operations to get around.
- TomVDB 6y ago> I'd rather they have scaled up the demand. There are car factories shutting down due to lack of chips. The silicon for the systems that I work on has its lead times increased from the customary <30 to 50 weeks. The supply issues is worldwide, for all fabless semiconductor issues. How do you suggest they scale up demand short of building their own fabs? (Which I hope you aren't suggesting...)
- Klwohu 6y agoBuilding more fabs is the only sustainable solution. Demand is higher than supply, and miners will just use older drivers or figure out a workaround pretty quickly, unless the new mining cards are substantially cheaper yet just as fast as the "gaming" GPUs.
- kcg 6y agoI think people are missing the fact that the 3060 that NVIDIA is halving the hash rate on is not yet released. It is expected at the end of this month and different than the already-in-market 3060 Ti. The 3060 Ti was already NVIDIA's mining efficiency leader (per W and per $). I think the 3060 would be in the same ballpark, if not better, which I assume is why NVIDIA is doing this. Presumably they will do nothing to the existing cards (in part because it would solve very little if you could just use old drivers to get the unthrottled MH/s).
- kmeisthax 6y agoNvidia uses boot-chain security to prohibit third-party drivers from using their GPUs - if you don't use Nvidia's own power-management blob, the card will lock itself to the lowest thermal bucket and highest fan speed until you reset it. It's arguably why they're able to segment their GPUs by application so effectively.
- Jonnax 6y agoIt's kinda amazing that Nvidia could have increased the RRP for each of their 30 series cards by $300 and it'd still be in short supply.
- vlovich123 6y agoAren't ASIC miners at least an order (or in the case of Bitcoin, several orders) of magnitude more efficient than these chips? Is this just more attractive in terms of more easily accessible supply?
- dis-sys 6y agothose who bought 3090/3080 five months ago can probably sell their GPU cards at the original purchase price. you will never be able to do that for those ASIC based devices.
- Thaxll 6y agoNot original more like 2x more.
- jimmaswell 6y agoI never got around to selling my old r9 380 that I used to do some mining on. Unfortunately too old now I guess, doesn't go for more than $80.
- rtrdea 6y agoPeople still GPU mine ether
- mindcandy 6y agoASICs are great for Bitcoin because B’s algo strains the math features of a chip. An ASIC can bake a whole iteration of the algo into a single, huge instruction. Many people in the community don’t like ASICs in crypto because they believe their high cost and rarity creates a hurdle for mass adoption. Every kid playing games on their computer has a GPU, but it’s much harder for that same kid to get their hands in an ASIC. Mass adoption by all kinds of people, not just already rich corporations, is important to the security and the mission of crypto. In response, Ethereum was designed to have an algo that stresses your RAM rather than your processor. This reduces the advantage of ASICs tremendously. You can’t drive RAM much harder than GPUs already do. And so, Eth and many other memory-hard cryptos are still mined on GPUs.
- IceWreck 6y agoWhile I hate the GPU shortage, I dont think this is the right way to go. Artificially limiting what you can and cannot do on your hardware is a bad precedent.
- Ciantic 6y ago> Artificially limiting what you can and cannot do on your hardware is a bad precedent. Unfortunately it happens all the time. For instance Nvidia had Quadro lineup, with nicer multi-display settings that to my knowledge was always just driver thing. They never ported those to GeForce line up, and people suffered with displays that wake up too late and all windows were messed up when you waked up your computer. It hasn't happened to me lately so they might have fixed it, problem was that if one of the displays took longer to wake up then Windows didn't recognize it until it was too late. With Quadro you could force the EDI settings so that it faked for operating system that the display was there.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- ChrisLomont 6y ago>Artificially limiting what you can and cannot do on your hardware is a bad precedent. Everything does it - from Intel chips being binned by performance, Windows versions and # of CPUs, and pretty much any big software products. Another way to see it is: it costs X to develop a line, and a vendor can charge everyone the same, no matter how they use it, or they can design and partition the line so users with different needs pay more or less. So, for example, a home PC with 8 cores is not paying for software that handles 128 cores, and those needing 128 core software pay more. When Intel does a run of CPUs, and tests them, and finds some can run at 4 GHz, and others only at 3 GHz, then they can either throw out the 3GHz ones and charge everyone much, much more for the single sku, or they can partition the same chip into bins for different prices, effectively lowering the chip cost for every single sku. The alternative to pricing in tiers is to charge the 128 core user less, and the 8 core user more, then the majority of users get charged more for things they will never use. Or only sell the top of the top of the chip yield, making the per unit cost astronomical, since now your yields dropped through the floor. Personally, I like market segmentation, since it allows me to only pay for the things I want, while others can buy the things they want. I prefer not being charged to support development of things I don't want or need. And in some cases it lowers the cost for everyone.
- corebuffer 6y ago> We’re limiting the hash rate of GeForce RTX 3060 GPUs so they’re less desirable to miners and launching NVIDIA CMP for professional mining. Limiting to justify a new product. Like they do to fp64 rates and virtualization support. >RTX 3060 software drivers are designed to detect specific attributes of the Ethereum cryptocurrency mining algorithm, and limit the hash rate, or cryptocurrency mining efficiency, by around 50 percent. Nice, one more reason to get the open source driver moving. edit: formatting
- bronco21016 6y agoIt seems like manufacturers are now resorting to artificial means to curb demand, rather than increasing supply. What are the practical reasons supply hasn’t kept up? Obviously, a fab is expensive but they have to be just printing money with these things in the current market. This really goes across the board with semiconductors as CPU supply issues are outrageous right now as well. Why aren’t more fabs being built? Is this just plain and simple greed?
- neogodless 6y agoClearly the solution for everyone is to either make a popular computer game that matches the signature of cryptocurrency mining, or develop a cryptocurrency that is mined by beating computer games that require high quality and frame rates to maximize the mining rate. The graphic card manufacturers would, of course, have to optimize their hardware and software for these situations, to make the gamers happy.
- panpanna 6y agoWill this work? One "excuse" miner had for buying GPUs was that they could sell them 6-12 months to gamers.
- SloopJon 6y agoIf NVIDIA feels the need to gimp the upcoming RTX 3060, that suggests that the new CMP cards will not be attractive enough to compete on their own price/merit, or that they will be similarly supply constrained. That said, I'm curious to see how they perform for machine learning.
- michaelt 6y agoOf course they won't compete on their own price/merit. This will be like Quadro: Same chip, a couple of feature flags flipped, then sold at several times the price to price-insensitive market segments. Nvidia have noticed miners will pay $1000 for an MSRP $500 card, and they want to take a cut without alienating the gaming market too much.
- lupire 6y agoSounds like merit is is high, since people are happy to pay double what the gamers pay.
- dannyw 6y agoI'm a miner (7x3070, 2x3080, 1x3090) and I support this nerf. The reason is because I am also a gamer, and it's always regrettable that cryptocurrency mining has made gaming cards out of reach.
- 0xfaded 6y agoOut of curiosity how did you get those cards? Did you manage to buy them at retail or is the economics such that the miners are willing to pay the scalper premium?
- dannyw 6y agoI bought them through a IT reseller, at more or less retail price around here.
- patriksvensson 6y agoHonest question: Have you calculated your profits now VS what your profits would have been if those same $$ purchased the cryptocurrency of your choice on the day you bought the cards instead? Which would have been more profitable (taking selling the equipment after into consideration as well).
- vosper 6y agoAre you making a profit mining? Or is it more of a “supporting the network” kind of thing?
- CryptoGhost 6y agoNvidia should partner with Steam. Steam has enough meta-data on user accounts to be able to offer a level of certainty about how accurate and authentic a given account and it's user information is. You could then use a trusted enough Steam account as a one-per-customer method to sell a card to. You wouldn't have to monkey around with hardware freedom and even if a person decides to re-sell it at least it had the chance of being used by a "real gamer" first.
- 0xfaded 6y agoI'm in the market for a card for computer vision stuff, but don't have steam.
- CryptoGhost 6y agoUnderstood but Nvidia is justifying the changes by saying "we’re taking an important step to help ensure GeForce GPUs end up in the hands of gamers."
- thomastjeffery 6y agoGames are the main audience that benefits, but not the only intended one. Really, any consumer who isn't buying the card for mining is the intended beneficiary here.
- thomastjeffery 6y agoThat would be much worse than this.
- pjfin123 6y agoIt seems like Ethereum 2.0 style proof of stake taking off could really limit a lot of the harms with crypto mining.
- mikkelam 6y agoYeah this definitely seems weirdly late for nvidia to enter. Mining is about to die.
- driverdan 6y agoUnless they're cheap no one is going to buy them. Those hash rates are terrible. I get 50MH+ on my 2080ti at around 200W. Why would someone buy hardware that's worse than a 2 year old GPU?
- dblooman 6y agoOrdered a 3080 Card 1 hour after launch months ago, it arrived last week, never waited for a PC component of this cost for this long
- smcleod 6y agoIs it just me or does the model naming seem misleading - 30HX has a hash rate of 26MH.
- ur-whale 6y agoWe sell you this product, but we will make damn sure to decide what you can and can't do with it and will therefore throttle its abilities. Linus was absolutely correct.
- dang 6y agoA related article is https://wccftech.com/nvidia-launches-cmp-30hx-40hx-50hx-and-90hx-gpus-for-mining-cripples-hash-rate-of-rtx-3060/ https://wccftech.com/nvidia-launches-cmp-30hx-40hx-50hx-and-... (via https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26180342 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26180342, but we merged the threads)
- unanswered 6y agoA lot of comments are referring to hardware freedom to run what you want but I don't see anywhere in the article saying that you can't run whatever you want to on this hardware. It's just going to pretend to be slower hardware, not cut off capabilities. It seems entirely within Nvidia's moral rights to release a product that is not the best possible of all conceivable products; that's literally the point of the budget gpus anyway! The behavior on display in this thread is highly reminiscent of the behavior of people demanding that open source authors do free work for them.
- judge2020 6y agoThe issue seems to be that it's the driver doing the halving, not the hardware itself, which is a little odd. Given the large profitability, anyone who actually buys 3060's for mining will hack the driver/pay for a hacked driver that removes this limitation. > RTX 3060 software drivers are designed to detect specific attributes of the Ethereum cryptocurrency mining algorithm, and limit the hash rate, or cryptocurrency mining efficiency, by around 50 percent.
- wruza 6y agoIt’s baffling. Almost like people do like both to complain and to not have nice things. I bet that a huge part of them don’t do neither of ML, mining, nor free software at all. The naked fact that a mid-tier card already costs half a decent car escapes their reasoning somehow.
- reilly3000 6y agoGPU supply is a huge problem, but this is a massively problematic solution. It likely won't even work; if it can be done w/ firmware, it will be reversed by firmware patches. I've been all through GPU firmware flashes in a quest to get both NVIDIA and AMD cards passed through to VMs w/ QEMU on Unraid, and I feel like this could be easily circumvented based on that experience.
- pizza234 6y ago> I've been all through GPU firmware flashes in a quest to get both NVIDIA and AMD cards passed through to VMs w/ QEMU on Unraid I you refer to the infamous Error 43 on Nvidia, it can be worked around by setting some QEMU flags.
- Zenst 6y agoWould be better if they just did specialised versions of their datacenter systems geared towards the issue and capitalise upon it for a win win around. However as a stop-gap solution that won't impact many, but some crypto miners - I can see what they are going for.
- hahahahe 6y agoThis is a joke right? This also confirms their figure (5-10%) for crypto mining was a blatant lie.
- arsome 6y agoSounds like it's time to crack some NVIDIA drivers. I already do it for the video encoding limitations, why not this too? Miners are willing to go to some really hacky extremes, reflashing firmwares, custom fan mods, extreme overclock configurations, etc to maximize hashrates and certainly won't care if they have to jump through some hoops to patch a specific version of the Linux driver or enable unsigned drivers on Windows, as long as they make more profit. Good luck with this one NVIDIA but you're playing a losing game. As soon as one un-restricted version of the driver exists, this is as good as useless and demand will be the same as ever for these cards unless they're able to ship CMP cards at a very high rate, but my understanding is the restriction here is silicon. Let's not forget that last time they produced "mining only" cards, people managed to crack the drivers to render graphics too... this is no exception. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TY4s35uULg4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TY4s35uULg4
- tus89 6y agoIs it even in theory possible to produce silicon that does not perform well on crypto operations while allows 3D to run at full speed? Or do they simply rely on the same underlying operations?
- leetcrew 6y agowouldn't hashing be mostly int operations, while 3D graphics would be FP32? I dunno if they still do this, but nvidia used to artificially limit the rate for other float widths on geforce parts to segment the market.
- monocasa 6y agoThere's plenty of integer ops in games these days. They do pretty arbitrary computation in compute shaders.
- jsheard 6y agoSomeone with early access to 3060 hardware, but not access to the launch drivers managed to wrangle it into working on pre-3060 drivers and still found that mining performance was artificially reduced. It starts high then falls off after a minute or so when some heuristic decides that mining is happening. https://videocardz.com/newz/zotac-geforce-rtx-3060-early-gpu-mining-test-shows-reduced-hashrate-in-action https://videocardz.com/newz/zotac-geforce-rtx-3060-early-gpu... There's speculation that the limiter might actually live in the cards VBIOS, which is much harder to modify than the driver as newer Nvidia cards require a signed VBIOS to boot.
- golover721 6y agoI wonder how much of this is Nvidia getting pressure from the Gaming industry to do something about it. As far as Nvidia is concerned they are selling as many units as they can produce, so it is a gold rush for them. The gaming industry I am sure is getting concerned that for their new AAA titles already under development which require these high end GPUs, their customers won’t be able to get ahold of them. Or at least will be unwilling to pay the huge markups that the cards are going for.
- disiplus 6y agowell, people will buy a console (i have a ps5) nvidia does not want that.
- fomine3 6y agoI suspect this is good point. Many light-mid gamers want to buy a new console or jump into a gaming PC, and both are in shortage. Selling gaming PC in this timing is important.
- paulmd 6y ago> As far as Nvidia is concerned they are selling as many units as they can produce, so it is a gold rush for them. It actually is not, because those cards sold to miners don't just magically vanish, when crypto prices finally fall the miners will flood the market and the prices for new cards will have to be depressed as a result. Mining sales should largely be thought of as a "pull-forward", they represent revenue that you're not going to make in some future quarter when everyone is buying used miner cards for 40% under MSRP. And NVIDIA themselves don't crank the chip price for OEMs (all of that was locked in a year ago) so they aren't making more money in the short term to make up for it. That is specifically what NVIDIA is trying to address here by banning mining on gaming cards and creating mining-specific cards that can't be gamed on. Now cards that are sold for mining can't flood back and hit their future revenue in the gaming market.
- qqii 6y agoIt seems that most people have forgotten what it was like at the end of the mining craze and GPUs were plentiful, or that they've tried this tactic before (without the aggressive artificial restrictions).
- Klwohu 6y agoHahaha, this can't be real. Will they gimp the RTX-3060 in other applications like machine learning too? Will people who already bought these cards for mining have to watch out for updated drivers or firmware? This is an absolute nightmare scenario which will come back to haunt Nvidia for years. I can't believe they approved this. It'll be interesting to see how games perform on the newly gimped cards people already own. Can they firmware-gimp a card to reliably stop mining without affecting games? We'll see!
- terramex 6y agoRTX 3060 has not been released yet, it goes on sale February 25th.
- Klwohu 6y agoOK, but it still seems like a problem until people can see that this doesn't affect their games. Perhaps this will reduce demand among miners after all. I shouldn't be surprised - this is what Nvidia already does with their Quadro vs. consumer line. Heck, I owned a Sound Blaster Live! which was functionally equivalent to the EMU APS and used the hacked drivers for years back in the olden days.
- pizza234 6y ago> Will they gimp the RTX-3060 in other applications like machine learning too? While their move is questionable (I don't judge, but recognize that it's questionable), there is a situation out there that is 1. specific and 2. concrete (gaming cards that can't be purchased for gaming), which is unlikely to apply also to machine learning.
- mywittyname 6y ago>Hahaha, this can't be real. Will they gimp the RTX-3060 in other applications like machine learning too? Maybe? It would make sense because ML use cases are professional and there's a lot of money to be made there. This isn't without precedent. Quadro cards have always been 99% GeForce cards with some special bios magic to de-gimp them for CAD or VFX applications. They charge 4x the price because they know that workstations running $50,000 a seat software can afford the premium.
- Bayart 6y agoI wonder who they're going to blame when they still can't get their card but can't pin it on the miners. As for these mining cards, without the resale value they might as well be ASICs.
- k__ 6y agoIs mining a viable investment?
- OldHand2018 6y agoAt this exact moment, yes (I would think). But that says nothing about tomorrow, or next month. Even if the crypto price stays the same or goes higher, your ROI depends on how many other people are mining and what their hash rate is. The people that are doing the best right now are almost certainly the ones with fully depreciated equipment.
- Causality1 6y agoEven simpler way to be to lock the card to a specific unique Nvidia account for a limited period after sale.
- scotty79 6y agoReleasing dedicated hardware for mining cryptocurrencies is the only way to go forward. Miners that use gaming hardware to mine must just be priced out of the market by more efficient dedicated hardware. This happened for bitcoin. If you don't have latest ASIC you can't even dream of mining bitcoin unless your electricity costs nothing. And even then you are still better off investing in ASIC as opposed to gaming hardware.
- 127 6y agoA chip that can mine Ethereum well is also a chip that can do mass parallel general purpose computing well.
- scotty79 6y agoWonderful. Maybe we could reuse Ethereum ASICs for AI. The fact that people waste electricity gaming drove the development of GPUs that serve researchers. Maybe more general mining software will end up cheaply in hands of scientists as well?
- qqii 6y agoA chip that is good at general parallel computing is a good as an ethereum mining. A chip thst is good at ethereum mining doesn't necessarily have to be good at general parallel computing. ASICs are ASICs, application specific.
- qqii 6y agoThat wouldn't solve the fundamental issue of supply and demand during a mining craze. Mining crazes appear quickly and dissappear quickly leaving little opportunity for the much slower silicon pipeline to catch up. The demand for cryptocurrency ASICs in the last mining boom was much higher than the production. Thus even if they could meet demand that would just result in less allocation to gaming hardware. The reason it has been successful for bitcoin is becuase sha256 utilises only half of the gpu whereas memory hard algorithms like ethash utilise almost all of it. Designing a specialised, power efficient ASIC only matters when the return isn't ludicrous. During mining bubbles it makes a lot more sense for miners to purchase general hardware to use during the craze and sell afterwards. Until these bubbles aren't as crazy that's not going to dissappear.
- glsdfgkjsklfj 6y agonvidia going to learn a lesson. first, this is very obviously because they noticed cloud operators are offering these RTX cards and they do not have a 10x-the-price-enteprise-quadroRTX yet. what they think will happen: they will blame miners for their production issues, make RTX cards less attractive for cloud operators, sell a truck load of quadro cards to them while offloading RTX cards to actual gamers who then generate revenue in other ways (they do not have those free game bundles deals for nothing) What will happen: nerf cards, lose sales for gamers and ML startups. impact production lines even more with multiple models, lose sales for cloud operators. cause actual miners (not their strawman 'oh the prices are up' for their production issues) to either reverse engineer the drivers, or just keep the old drivers running and buying the now-cheaper RTX cards, compounding the production capacity. game studios that started to use those features to speed up crowd AI etc will just slap a "AMD Recommended" on their games.
- Hammershaft 6y agoDo you have a source on game studios using hashing for crowd AI?
- glsdfgkjsklfj 6y agooh boy! are you assuming the people responsible for GPU drivers are going to write what is basically a real time code signature detection and not screw up with ton of false positives to be debugged at the cost of the game studios?
- m463 6y agoWill this nerf minecraft too? ;)
- Justsignedup 6y agoThis is a terrible move. This is also a fantastic move. Personally I am very very VERY much okay with this. This will keep consumer cards in correct demand. And if miners want to throw away money for mining, they can. People talking of modding, its a high effort and high risk. Again, I'm okay with that. The cost of modding will likely be the same as just buying a specialized card. Overall mining is a horrible environmental impact.
- vbezhenar 6y agoBuying gamer GPU allows to sale it later, when crypto bubble pops up. Buying specialized hardware makes it useless later. Prices (and availability) for specialized hardware must be really sweet to satisfy miners.
- postalrat 6y agoAnd that's exactly what this move is meant to do.
- hvidgaard 6y agoThis move is not going to change anything. The Mining demand is more or less inelastic as long as it's profitable. Many of the major miners have power and space to basically expand with as many cards as they can get their hands on. So this card is just going to accelerate their expansion.
- dmitrygr 6y ago> RTX 3060 software drivers are > designed to detect specific > attributes of the Ethereum > cryptocurrency mining algorithm, > and limit the hash rate, or > cryptocurrency mining > efficiency, by around 50 > percent. I have no interest in crypto, but hacking around this restriction sounds fun. I think announcing this publicly was a mistake. There are a lot of people who'l take this as a challenge, especially if these cards are easier to purchase. I expect hacked drivers in weeks, if not days.
- mehlmao 6y agoSo does this impact Hashcat too? Any clue if they'll get rid of the restrictions once supply catches up to demand?
- xtanx 6y ago> Any clue if they'll get rid of the restrictions once supply catches up to demand? Now that is a great question. If they were purely doing this for their supply issues and not for control they would be stating that this is just temporary.
- unnouinceput 6y agoQuote: "RTX 3060 software drivers are designed to detect specific attributes of the Ethereum cryptocurrency mining algorithm, and limit the hash rate, or cryptocurrency mining efficiency, by around 50 percent." So, a software solution to a hardware issue? Well, this is going to work exactly like expected. Can somebody spell "cracked games"?
- mullingitover 6y agoIt would be fantastic if mining activity could be detected at the hardware level in order to engage throttling. Honestly if cryptocurrencies are going to be a thing, it wouldn't make any sense for hardware makers to ever sell anything that could be used for mining. They could just build their own mining equipment, own the market, and not sell (or sell at a prohibitive markup) any hardware that makes serious mining profitable. I'm saying this as a person who wants to use computers for something useful, like playing games.
- lifeplusplus 6y agono because they can more money annually selling cards than mining, beside investors don't put in money in nvidia because it engages in crypto but because it's a video card company.
- mullingitover 6y agoSaying they can make more money selling the cards doesn't make sense if the cards are actually profitable to use as mining equipment. Plus, investors don't care if nvidia is a video card company or they sell toilet paper, they care about their performance as an investment. If nvidia could pivot and double your investment, would you really care what they were pivoting to?
- qqii 6y agoNividia can't just suddenly decide to keep cards for themselves for mining, they have pre arranged agreements to fulfil with their partners. Pivoting and creating a mining division also doesn't make sense - mining companies take on a lot more risk from volatile market prices and need to have a lot more cash on hand to sustain the long periods of unprofitability.
- mullingitover 6y agoSure, I'm not saying nvidia would just decide to stop shipping tomorrow. However, if crypto is really viable and long-term profitable, it wouldn't make a ton of sense for them to give their potential competitors (e.g. anyone else who wants to mine) capital equipment at what would amount to a loss. They could subcontract the operation of the mining equipment to third parties so they make a profit immediately selling the mining hardware, and skim as much mining profit as possible while their subcontractors assume all the risk. (Just using nvidia as an example, but this model would work well for anyone making hardware that's capable of mining at scale).
- raghavtoshniwal 6y agoNeither a gamer nor a miner but would love some perspective here because something about this doesn't make sense to me. If Nvidia has the capability to make a differentiated mining product, shouldn't that be enough to get miners to go for it? Why halve the hashing rate on the "gaming" GPU artificially? If it is a supply issue, shouldn't Nvidia, as a company, try and solve for it directly (maybe it is really hard?), instead of making their products unattractive to a certain set of customers?
- qqii 6y agoFrom a miner's perspective there's little incentive (in cost difference) to get a mining specific card that doesn't hold its value when the mining craze is over compared to a general card which can be sold on the seccond hand market if necessary. The same criticisms were given last time nividia tried to make a mining card and obviously it didn't work as last time they didn't need to use artificial limits.
- postalrat 6y agoThere will be when the mining cards cost 1/4 the price for the same performance/watt as the gaming cards.
- qqii 6y agoAlgorithms that are still protifable mine on GPUs were designed with ASIC resiliency in mind - they use memory hard algorithms. This makes the problem of designing specialised mining cards equivalent to designing fast and efficient DRAM, an area where the consumer product is the cutting edge. This was by design to reduce hashrate centralisation. Even the latest ethereum ASICs are only 10% more efficient, cost much more and can only mine ethash and its variants. So as it stands I see no evidence that suggests mining cards will be cheaper with better efficiency, especially when the cryptocurrency community slowly moving away from mining.
- fomine3 6y agoFinally used mining cards are sold as video cards by weird modification.
- bogwog 6y agoEDIT: nevermind, I didn't realize the 3060 wasn't out yet. In that case, I think this is a good move (if it actually works). Disregard everything below... I hate mining, I love my (old-ish) Nvidia GPU, and what this will do for the availability of cards and reliability of cards on the second-hand market is great. But, FUCK this. Nvidia just removed a feature from a product customers paid for, and then sold it back to them in a new product. This is like if Apple disabled Wifi on old iPhones to force you to buy a new one. It doesn't matter whether the reasoning behind this particular decision is something you agree with, a company should not be allowed to get away with doing something like this. I hope a class action lawsuit comes out of this and Nvidia loses big, because a world where a company can do this by adding sufficient spin to the decision, is terrible for consumers.
- bcatanzaro 6y agoThis isn’t true. No one has bought an RTX 3060. It is going to be released next week. Nothing is happening to products people already bought.
- lxgr 6y ago> Nvidia just removed a feature from a product customers paid for Isn't the 3060 a new product?
- lajamerr 6y agoNo one has bought this product yet. It's not out till February 25th. So Nvidia isn't removing/nerfing a feature that someone paid for. This isn't like Sony removing Linux on the fat PS3 post launch.
- boxingdog 6y agominers are using laptops with rtx, they will eat the new minning gpus along the rtx lol
- vmception 6y ago> RTX 3060 software drivers are designed to detect specific attributes of the Ethereum cryptocurrency mining algorithm, and limit the hash rate, or cryptocurrency mining efficiency, by around 50 percent. Its an opportunity for someone to hack the drivers
- R0b0t1 6y agoOr to just rearrange the operations so that the detection won't trigger.
- vmception 6y agoChallenge accepted Business opportunity because other miners will pay for the driver (or the mining software you make has the 2% mining fee to your address) or you can be the only one that has the driver and buys up all the rtx cards yourself if you have access to capital vertically integrated is harder of course but could have the biggest payoff
- R0b0t1 6y agoI know how I'd do it but nobody paying me to do it so it's not really tractable for the time being. Is the mining payout actually attractive? I thought people were still running at a loss.
- vmception 6y agoThese realities change every minute and most mining calculators are super wrong. For example, for Ethereum, mining calculators assume the block reward of 2 Eth, but for the past year each block has had like 5 Eth on average because the transaction fees are so high, extended periods of time with 7-10 Eth per block. So its double and triple the estimated payout if you are just taking a passing look.
- superbaconman 6y agoI've been trying to get a 3000 series card for months. I could have just settled for an AMD, but I want use the hardware for more than gaming. I'll still be buying an Nvidia GPU, but definitely not this one.
- beervirus 6y agoI didn’t realize people still mined on gpu anymore, thought everything was asic.
- qqii 6y agoASICs requite a lot of up front capital to design and manufacture. ASICs also only really matter when prices are low and performance/watt matters. There's also limited supply too. The popular gpu algorithm is ethereum, who's heading algorithm (ethash) is memory hard, so muhh of the performance relies on the speed of commercial DRAM chips so the difference between ASICs and GPUs are not as great. Along with the lower incentive as ethereum plans to move to proof of stake ASICs for ethereum are not as popular or common.
- charcircuit 6y agoSome cryptocurrencies use ASIC resistant algorithms for PoW. This helps decentralize the miners. Since a lot of people and gamers already have GPUs they can get right into mining without having to order any custom hardware.
- devwastaken 6y agoGood. This is exactly what I want. Make hash crunching meaningless on a gaming GPU and tell the people mining black market money to go buy an ASIC if they want to mine. Also stop selling on Amazon and Newegg and push the supply to physical stores. Computing tech need to come together and make amazon agree to banning scalper selling. Either it's sold at price or lower or not at all.
- errantmind 6y agoSome cryptocurrencies, like Monero (XMR) are ASIC-resistant by design, to prevent centralization. They are meant to be mined on commodity CPUs and GPUs
- qqii 6y agoIt's easy to forget that the impact of mining comes in waves - most gamers weren't complaining when the market became saturated by seccond hand GPUs at the end of the mining craze. At the end of the day GPUs are a luxury.
- g051051 6y agoIt's nice that Nvidia gets to artificially restrict what I can do with their products after I buy them. I had this problem years ago...I bought a USB video adapter to enable using a second screen while my main screen was running games...they had code in the driver to disable things like physx if a second display was detected.
- 9935c101ab17a66 6y agoBut the RTX 3060 hasn't launched yet?
- g051051 6y agoSounds like they're using software to artificially limit the capabilities when it comes out.
- stale2002 6y agoOk, but it is not taking away something that you bought or anything. The specifications are known up front. You can choose not to buy something if you don't like the software on it.
- g051051 6y ago> Ok, but it is not taking away something that you bought or anything. Yes, it is. The hardware has capabilities, and Nvidia is artificially limiting them in certain circumstances based on what they consider "acceptable" use.
- stale2002 6y ago> The hardware has capabilities, and Nvidia is artificially limiting them But that is not taking anything away form you. If you buy something, knowing what software is on that thing, you are getting what you were sold. You were told that this would be the software on this device, and you bought it anyway. Just don't buy something if you don't like what that product is. You were told what software is on that device!
- tyingq 6y agoI don't have much knowledge in this space, so a question... Is it likely that this affects something more than just mining? Or is this hobbling specific enough to leave the card unhobbled for every other need?
- StrLght 6y agoHard to say because no-one had an opportunity to benchmark RTX 3060. Theoretically I'd be mostly worried about everything related to huge amounts hashing (eg. bruteforcing password hashes).
- Mandatum 6y agoThis driver will be patched in a few days. They're kidding if they think this will stop miners looking for cheaper rigs.
- motoboi 6y agoThey simply started a capture the flag competition where the flag is the ability to use cheaper (decreased hash power will reduce price generally) and more lucrative cards to mine ethereum.
- homero 6y agoHow does this new card compare in price? If it's more expensive then it's useless and they'll continue buying the graphics cards
- ILikeBikes 6y agoI do hate miners But I'm concerned that a company can tell you what you can or can't do with your hardware. Where is the spirit behind the hacker community, Jailbreaking iPhones, the right to repair, the ban of tattoos that prevented the use of Linux on PCs,... That's a very concerning move from me. Also, for a company that does morale : (1) Nvidia's marketing is one of the best for making old products look obsolete and replaceable. Most gamers would do great with their old gen card, they just don't need to upgrade already. But they reserve cards for them so that they can create as much e-waste as they want (2) they could just have prevented supply issues if their supply chains were diverse and resilient. But it turns out they aren't. And it's not something that was asked by the gamers (3) for a company that's focused around gamers, they have already prevented powerful "crypto" GPUs from being repurposed into gaming gear, as featured in LTT https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TY4s35uULg4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TY4s35uULg4
- Someone1234 6y agoI agree, but it should be noted that this isn't unusual for Nvidia: See Quadro Vs. Geforce. If you trick a system into thinking the Geforce GPU is a Quadro suddenly additional functionality/performance improvements unlock in the software/driver layer.
- convery 6y agoYep, I have a old Geforce GPU with only VGA/DVI output just to use nView (although I had to modify it slightly). Such a weird thing, having a nice window manger for Windows but requiring non-technical people to buy an overpriced GPU to use it.
- hyperbovine 6y agoVote with your wallet then. ATI has a Radeon they’d love to sell you.
- jakeinspace 6y agoI've been helping keep my bedroom warm each night this week by mining ethereum on my RTX 2070 - made about $6 net so far. The fact that I'm benefiting from the waste heat literally helps me sleep at night.
- reducesuffering 6y agoYou're probably spending much more on the electricity used than the $ from ETH. You're probably better off buying a real heater...
- jakeinspace 6y agoYou'd think so, but that's not the case. Electricity is only running me around 7 cents / kWh, so when I say "net" I mean it. Ethereum is up 7x over the last year, and is largely driving the surge in GPU prices - if it weren't currently profitable, nobody would be buying modern GPUs for mining it. Regardless, even if I were losing money, 100% of the waste heat from my computer is doing actual useful work in heating my room. No electric space heater would be more energy efficient at that, although it would be quieter and put out more heat per unit area.
- SilverRed 6y agoA heat pump would be far more efficient if you have the ability to install one in your room.
- jakeinspace 6y agoThat's definitely true, but would be a significant additional cost. I'm just supplementing the gas furnace, which is controlled by a single thermostat. I could bump up the temperature for the whole house, but my room just happens to be particularly drafty, with 3 older bay windows which need to be replaced.
- chillacy 6y agoElectricity to heat conversion is 100% efficient by definition (entropy), so it’s theoretically no worse than if OP bought a plug in electric heater afaik.
- rubatuga 6y agoIt’s like Apple saying you can’t use Linux emulators on iPhones through the App Store, but allowing Linux emulators through safari WebAssembly, which is 10x slower. Not that big of a deal IMO.
- l33tfr4gg3r 6y agoI thought this was a great video about NVIDIA chasing the profits while screwing over gamers. https://youtu.be/sg__YdXbRtI https://youtu.be/sg__YdXbRtI
- fomine3 6y agoI don't know how they limit the performance, but I suspect that mining perf/watt is better than full load so possibly not bad for mining on higher electricity bill country.
- hereme888 6y agoWhat will happen when Bitcoin and other cryptos have awarded the max number of tokens and there's no more incentive for miners? Who will keep the system running?
- boring_twenties 6y agoThere are two incentives for miners: the block reward and the transaction fees. After the max number of Bitcoins is reached there will be no more block rewards but fees will continue.
- fomine3 6y agoAnyone working on mining on Xbox Series X|S? It should be good GPU and it looks like Microsoft opened homebrew.
- wolczek 6y agoNext thing will be cuts for deep learning on cheap cards
- noipv4 6y agoEngineers are dumb economists. nvidia could sell the full mining power BIOS or driver as a DLC.
- nahimn 6y agoCause these miners can't just load quadro drivers and proceed anyway... What a waste of time for everyone
- musicale 6y agoThis sort of makes me ill as well. Nvidia is kind of throwing gamers a bone while figuring out how to profit from cryptocurrency mining. I guess it makes business sense, but I still hate the externalities of cryptocurrency mining.
- rasz 6y agoI am wondering when miners are going to jump on PS5 consoles. Latest PS4 webkit exploit works on those so you can run non signed code, and GPU is supposed to be very fast.
- soheil 6y agoDoes it also cut the power consumption in half? If so that just means miners will buy more cards not less since their marginal cost of mining won't be affected.
- davesque 6y agoThey might be under a lot of economic pressure to do this. After all, if one of the premier manufacturers of gaming GPUs can't get their product into the hands of gamers, the game industry as a whole will certainly suffer. Imagine the extreme scenario where large studios develop and release their next gen AAA titles only to find out no one's buying them because they can't find any GPUs to run them on.
- oh_sigh 6y agoGamers want to spend $500 on a GPU, whereas miners want to spend $1000 on a GPU. It makes sense that NVIDIA would have two offerings. Crypto may for the most part move on from non-GPU intensive methods, but gamers will almost always be looking for the cutting edge, so it would be wise to be able to continue to be competitive with the gaming market.
- Jaxkr 6y agoAbsolutely hilarious that NVIDIA thinks this will prevent people from mining on their cards. Modified drivers will immediately be created and distributed.
- zcw100 6y agoThis is nothing but an attack on general purpose computing. So now if some company doesn’t like what you’re doing with their hardware they’re going to knee cap you? You might think it’s ok now because you don’t like the environmental effects of crypto mining but you better ask if your going to ok with the next thing they go after.
- xtanx 6y agoLets analyze the following statement: > RTX 3060 software drivers are designed to detect specific attributes of the Ethereum cryptocurrency mining algorithm, and limit the hash rate, or cryptocurrency mining efficiency, by around 50 percent. Why just Ethereum? This cannot possibly limit the sales of 3060 alone because there are a zillion cryptocurrencies. People will just use it to mine for other crypto currencies right?. Also 50% reduction. They wouldn't hardcode this percentage. The number obviously needs to be able to go up to 100% (no limit) and down to 0 - ie block it completely. This effectively means 2 things: 1. Their detection algorithm is "upgradable". They wouldn't do that just for Ethereum. 2. That they can block any kind of workload they can detect. Should we allow them to have the power to do that?