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Have 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 aff

Have 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 ago
Yeah, this is about par for the course for Nvidia. I wish AMD had a working product to kick their teeth in...
- kmeisthax 6y ago
  They mostly do, the problem is that they're even more supply-constrained than Nvidia right now.
- COGlory 6y ago
  They 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.
  - izacus 6y ago
    And the reason you can't buy them is exactly the same reason nVidia is adding limitations - to try to make the cards less appealing to scalpers so the actual customers may get some.
    - judge2020 6y ago
      I think you mean 'miners' - scalpers don't care.
  - encryptluks2 6y ago
    Except you won't be able to buy any of them, even when they are released.
    - account42 6y ago
      You might not like the price, but the 6800/6900 ones tend to stay in stock these days in at least some parts of the world [0][1] [0] https://www.mindfactory.de/Hardware/Grafikkarten+(VGA)/Radeon+RX+Serie.html https://www.mindfactory.de/Hardware/Grafikkarten+(VGA)/Radeo... [1] https://www.alternate.de/Grafikkarten/Big-Navi https://www.alternate.de/Grafikkarten/Big-Navi
  - slezyr 6y ago
    5700XT costs 1000$ in Ukraine. It cost 500$ when it just got released. WTF? Edit: 1100$ actually.
    - COGlory 6y ago
      I just sold a used one for $1100 that I paid $380 for on release. It's because crypto has gone up so much.
  - lozaning 6y ago
    AMD already did this. The RX6K series are terrible cards for mining. The radeon 7 smokes the new cards because the new ones where designed to be as bad at mining as possible without effecting raster performance. RX 5700 will hit 55mhs and the RX6K series will do ~68mhs, but the cost of the 5700 is typically like half that of a 6800. There's a reason it's easier to find the new AMD stuff in stock than nvidia stuff, they've got a terrible mining roi.
    - RealStickman_ 6y ago
      Vega 7 is a compute beast. The RX5xxx and RX6xxx are tuned for gaming performance and sacrifice unnecessary compute performance for better power efficiency. No wonder the V7 is way better at mining.
Jonnax 6y ago
I'm guessing their 3060 product is their budget card so it's easier for them to limit performance on that.
zelon88 6y ago
That's for the people who already own the card. If you're in the market for a new card and you have the option of a powerful, purpose-built card that works out of the box or one that needs endless tweaking, few people would choose the more complex option. Especially if it means every new driver that gets released is going to require days to make work properly.
- wtallis 6y ago
  There's no "endless tweaking" to keep your GPU mining rig working. Constant GPU driver updates are the norm for gaming GPUs because GPU drivers include a huge pile of workarounds for buggy games, and there are new buggy games hitting the market all the time. But if you just want to run a specific straightforward GPGPU task like a miner, you only need to get one driver version properly cracked to unlock full performance, and keep using that until the hardware is no longer profitable to mine with. And it seems pretty likely that a countermeasure bolted on to the drivers this late in the process will be defeated fairly quickly, and miners will go on a second shopping spree after clearing out the stock of the new purpose-built mining cards. (Assuming those even ship before the 3060 drivers get cracked.)
  - judge2020 6y ago
    Plus, part of the profitability of mining cards is being able to resell them once their profitability is low (and they do usually still work fine for gaming after a year of mining). The new mining cards will have to be insanely profitable to make them look better than the 30-series cards.
    - nuodag 6y ago
      And i suspect this is one of the reasons Nvidia is doing this. Market Segmentation -> Sell two cards instead of one that gets resold on ebay
- bluescrn 6y ago
  A GeForce will have much more resale value than a mining-specific card once mining becomes unprofitable or the next generation of cards come along
paulpan 6y ago
So true. Nvidia can't not know how resourceful cryptominers are - and to what lengths a miner will go to modify the firmware for even a few percentage point improvements. It'll just lead to a never-ending back and forth (will daily drivers become a thing?) until Nvidia decides it's not worth the effort. This just seems like a feeble gesture at appeasing gamers. What's interesting is that these "mining-crippling" changes will only apply to the 3060 GPU, not the rest of the RTX 3000 series. If it was a legitimate gesture, then Nvidia would've made it universally applicable.
- lxgr 6y ago
  Maybe there is some hardware enforcement involved? Also, retroactively capping functionality of a sold product seems like a PR and legal nightmare.
  - g_p 6y ago
    The Sony PS3 precedent of removing OtherOS springs to mind regards retroactive restrictions.
  - paulpan 6y ago
    From the announcement it seems this is driver-side only, so a big nope.
    - lxgr 6y ago
      Hm, then I guess that given that this is a so far unreleased product (and assuming it's not supported in current drivers), Nvidia can at least sidestep the issue of miners just using an old driver version to get the hashing functionality back.
- cat199 6y ago
  > This just seems like a feeble gesture at appeasing gamers. Color me cynical, but this seems like a strong gesture at increasing margins on GPU computing by upselling using cryptocurrency and gamers as PR pawns/scapegoats if Nvidia is selling more cards than they can produce/distribute at desired target prices they should produce more cards and improve their distribution networks..
tibbydudeza 6y ago
The CMP cards will be much cheaper than the GPU gaming units so why would they bother ???.
- judge2020 6y ago
  Pricing is 'only via suppliers' so we have no idea if CMP will be insanely cheaper or if it'll only be slightly cheaper. This most likely won't even solve the current shortages since 3060TIs, 3070s and 3080s will work with an old driver (existing drivers doesn't have any online auto-update, so they can't 100% force a new driver on cards), and the 3060 driver/firmware (some speculate the word 'driver' is inaccurate in the blog post and it'll be a firmware thing) might be hacked to bypass this limitation, so once it's hacked they will just always flash that firmware or use the modified driver.
PragmaticPulp 6y ago
> This will only penalise average users. How? Currently, average users can't get their hands on any of these cards because they're being bought in bulk by crypto miners. As soon as mining becomes unprofitable, the market will be flooded with cards that have been run 24/7 for months or years, which isn't a recipe for a good experience. The average user can only benefit from getting access to these cards again. nVidia knows they can't afford to burn goodwill with their customers, whom they depend on to buy card upgrades every few years. > 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? nVidia isn't a resource-limited startup. They have a lot of smart people. They're obviously going to test the firmware against common workloads. Regardless, don't buy a card unless you know it does what you want it to do. These cards are all mining-limited from day 1, so it's not like the performance will regress suddenly.
- Const-me 6y ago
  > They're obviously going to test the firmware against common workloads. They can only test against pre-existing software. If they start penalizing uncommon workloads, this kills innovation in many areas, videogames included. In one of my projects I'm using GPGPUs for complicated optimizations in CAM/CAE. I don't use any libraries/frameworks. From nVidia's point of views, my compute shaders are extremely uncommon workload. Unwanted too, because I skipped CUDA and their vendor lock-in.
  - rubatuga 6y ago
    Just use a floating point op and it'll probably be never picked up as hashing.
  - neurostimulant 6y ago
    > If they start penalizing uncommon workloads, this kills innovation in many areas, videogames included. I'm not too worried about that. Nvidia has track record of releasing driver updates to address issues in end-user applications. If a legitimate application got accidentally flagged, people will report it and nvidia will whitelist them.

WrtCdEvrydy 6y ago

Yeah, this is about par for the course for Nvidia. I wish AMD had a working product to kick their teeth in...

kmeisthax 6y ago
They mostly do, the problem is that they're even more supply-constrained than Nvidia right now.
COGlory 6y ago
They 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.
- izacus 6y ago
  And the reason you can't buy them is exactly the same reason nVidia is adding limitations - to try to make the cards less appealing to scalpers so the actual customers may get some.
  - judge2020 6y ago
    I think you mean 'miners' - scalpers don't care.
- encryptluks2 6y ago
  Except you won't be able to buy any of them, even when they are released.
  - account42 6y ago
    You might not like the price, but the 6800/6900 ones tend to stay in stock these days in at least some parts of the world [0][1] [0] https://www.mindfactory.de/Hardware/Grafikkarten+(VGA)/Radeon+RX+Serie.html https://www.mindfactory.de/Hardware/Grafikkarten+(VGA)/Radeo... [1] https://www.alternate.de/Grafikkarten/Big-Navi https://www.alternate.de/Grafikkarten/Big-Navi
- slezyr 6y ago
  5700XT costs 1000$ in Ukraine. It cost 500$ when it just got released. WTF? Edit: 1100$ actually.
  - COGlory 6y ago
    I just sold a used one for $1100 that I paid $380 for on release. It's because crypto has gone up so much.
- lozaning 6y ago
  AMD already did this. The RX6K series are terrible cards for mining. The radeon 7 smokes the new cards because the new ones where designed to be as bad at mining as possible without effecting raster performance. RX 5700 will hit 55mhs and the RX6K series will do ~68mhs, but the cost of the 5700 is typically like half that of a 6800. There's a reason it's easier to find the new AMD stuff in stock than nvidia stuff, they've got a terrible mining roi.
  - RealStickman_ 6y ago
    Vega 7 is a compute beast. The RX5xxx and RX6xxx are tuned for gaming performance and sacrifice unnecessary compute performance for better power efficiency. No wonder the V7 is way better at mining.

Jonnax 6y ago

I'm guessing their 3060 product is their budget card so it's easier for them to limit performance on that.

zelon88 6y ago

That's for the people who already own the card. If you're in the market for a new card and you have the option of a powerful, purpose-built card that works out of the box or one that needs endless tweaking, few people would choose the more complex option. Especially if it means every new driver that gets released is going to require days to make work properly.

wtallis 6y ago
There's no "endless tweaking" to keep your GPU mining rig working. Constant GPU driver updates are the norm for gaming GPUs because GPU drivers include a huge pile of workarounds for buggy games, and there are new buggy games hitting the market all the time. But if you just want to run a specific straightforward GPGPU task like a miner, you only need to get one driver version properly cracked to unlock full performance, and keep using that until the hardware is no longer profitable to mine with. And it seems pretty likely that a countermeasure bolted on to the drivers this late in the process will be defeated fairly quickly, and miners will go on a second shopping spree after clearing out the stock of the new purpose-built mining cards. (Assuming those even ship before the 3060 drivers get cracked.)
- judge2020 6y ago
  Plus, part of the profitability of mining cards is being able to resell them once their profitability is low (and they do usually still work fine for gaming after a year of mining). The new mining cards will have to be insanely profitable to make them look better than the 30-series cards.
  - nuodag 6y ago
    And i suspect this is one of the reasons Nvidia is doing this. Market Segmentation -> Sell two cards instead of one that gets resold on ebay
bluescrn 6y ago
A GeForce will have much more resale value than a mining-specific card once mining becomes unprofitable or the next generation of cards come along

paulpan 6y ago

So true. Nvidia can't not know how resourceful cryptominers are - and to what lengths a miner will go to modify the firmware for even a few percentage point improvements. It'll just lead to a never-ending back and forth (will daily drivers become a thing?) until Nvidia decides it's not worth the effort. This just seems like a feeble gesture at appeasing gamers. What's interesting is that these "mining-crippling" changes will only apply to the 3060 GPU, not the rest of the RTX 3000 series. If it was a legitimate gesture, then Nvidia would've made it universally applicable.

lxgr 6y ago
Maybe there is some hardware enforcement involved? Also, retroactively capping functionality of a sold product seems like a PR and legal nightmare.
- g_p 6y ago
  The Sony PS3 precedent of removing OtherOS springs to mind regards retroactive restrictions.
- paulpan 6y ago
  From the announcement it seems this is driver-side only, so a big nope.
  - lxgr 6y ago
    Hm, then I guess that given that this is a so far unreleased product (and assuming it's not supported in current drivers), Nvidia can at least sidestep the issue of miners just using an old driver version to get the hashing functionality back.
cat199 6y ago
> This just seems like a feeble gesture at appeasing gamers. Color me cynical, but this seems like a strong gesture at increasing margins on GPU computing by upselling using cryptocurrency and gamers as PR pawns/scapegoats if Nvidia is selling more cards than they can produce/distribute at desired target prices they should produce more cards and improve their distribution networks..

tibbydudeza 6y ago

The CMP cards will be much cheaper than the GPU gaming units so why would they bother ???.

judge2020 6y ago
Pricing is 'only via suppliers' so we have no idea if CMP will be insanely cheaper or if it'll only be slightly cheaper. This most likely won't even solve the current shortages since 3060TIs, 3070s and 3080s will work with an old driver (existing drivers doesn't have any online auto-update, so they can't 100% force a new driver on cards), and the 3060 driver/firmware (some speculate the word 'driver' is inaccurate in the blog post and it'll be a firmware thing) might be hacked to bypass this limitation, so once it's hacked they will just always flash that firmware or use the modified driver.

PragmaticPulp 6y ago

> This will only penalise average users. How? Currently, average users can't get their hands on any of these cards because they're being bought in bulk by crypto miners. As soon as mining becomes unprofitable, the market will be flooded with cards that have been run 24/7 for months or years, which isn't a recipe for a good experience. The average user can only benefit from getting access to these cards again. nVidia knows they can't afford to burn goodwill with their customers, whom they depend on to buy card upgrades every few years. > 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? nVidia isn't a resource-limited startup. They have a lot of smart people. They're obviously going to test the firmware against common workloads. Regardless, don't buy a card unless you know it does what you want it to do. These cards are all mining-limited from day 1, so it's not like the performance will regress suddenly.

Const-me 6y ago
> They're obviously going to test the firmware against common workloads. They can only test against pre-existing software. If they start penalizing uncommon workloads, this kills innovation in many areas, videogames included. In one of my projects I'm using GPGPUs for complicated optimizations in CAM/CAE. I don't use any libraries/frameworks. From nVidia's point of views, my compute shaders are extremely uncommon workload. Unwanted too, because I skipped CUDA and their vendor lock-in.
- rubatuga 6y ago
  Just use a floating point op and it'll probably be never picked up as hashing.
- neurostimulant 6y ago
  > If they start penalizing uncommon workloads, this kills innovation in many areas, videogames included. I'm not too worried about that. Nvidia has track record of releasing driver updates to address issues in end-user applications. If a legitimate application got accidentally flagged, people will report it and nvidia will whitelist them.