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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

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
arsome 6y ago
It all depends on availability - if there are no more CMP cards available, but GeForce cards are still around and there's a known good cracked driver for them, this won't even be a question. Miners don't care about driver updates so it's really a one-off, not endless, once it's running they don't have to touch it.
PeterStuer 6y ago
People are and still will be buying up every card that they can get their hands on at a price that turns an ROI of less than 6 months. They-ll just download a different driver/firmware if needed.
tshaddox 6y ago
But surely it's not like Nvidia is suddenly adding brand new capacity to produce these new cryptocurrency cards. If they could do that, they could just do that with the same cards to make enough for gamers and miners.

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

arsome 6y ago

It all depends on availability - if there are no more CMP cards available, but GeForce cards are still around and there's a known good cracked driver for them, this won't even be a question. Miners don't care about driver updates so it's really a one-off, not endless, once it's running they don't have to touch it.

PeterStuer 6y ago

People are and still will be buying up every card that they can get their hands on at a price that turns an ROI of less than 6 months. They-ll just download a different driver/firmware if needed.

tshaddox 6y ago

But surely it's not like Nvidia is suddenly adding brand new capacity to produce these new cryptocurrency cards. If they could do that, they could just do that with the same cards to make enough for gamers and miners.