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Sounds 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 reall
by arsome 6y ago
Sounds 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.
- hinoki 6y agoSo we’ll see mod chips for GPUs soon?
- Answerawake 6y agoYES! I hope so if only to feel like I am back in the scene for just a moment. Miss those days. Maybe they can mod the VBIOS to show the crack group's logo on bootup just like how old VGA cards would show some company text before handing off to the PC.
- Const-me 6y ago> old VGA cards would show some company text before handing off to the PC My Gigabyte motherboard is doing that. Ain’t too old, has AMD’s X570 chipset.
- happynacho 6y agoWell, that's the motherboard, not the videocard. Every motherboard does it.
- remexre 6y agoYep, that's through the BGRT, which is part of ACPI. I'm not actually sure if a GPU could export one to the BIOS, but I assume not.
- im3w1l 6y agoThe connection to the monitor is physically located on the video card. So the gpu could display whatever it wants without asking or coordinating with the motherboard.
- codezero 6y agoOr the CMP line will actually fit the needs, and no need for games of whack a mole.
- dheera 6y agoMaybe it's time to create an adversarial network that can figure out how to mine on the GPU without causing it to halve the hash rate, train that network on an NVIDIA GPU, and shove it to them.
- 0-_-0 6y agoThat's not how adversarial networks work
- Strom 6y agoIndeed, I remember when I was doing some mining early in bitcoin's history. I had custom hacked BIOS on my AMD cards to be able to overclock beyond regular power limits. This flashing was possible only due to an exploit of the BIOS signature verification. Given that I was doing this as only a rather casual miner with three GPUs, I have no doubt that this new restriction will be attacked ruthlessly.
- zokier 6y agoIts not question if miners can/will crack it at some point (yes, they can). Question is how many miners will order the cards on day 0 without knowing if they can be used? The intention here is only to deter them enough that gamers have at least slightly better chance of getting these cards, and especially for launch-day orders.
- leshenka 6y agoI guess as long as mining shitcoins on a gpu is profitable we will have the gpu supply problem.
- Average_ 6y ago> I already do it for the video encoding limitations, why not this too? That sounds pretty interesting. Mind elaborating on what changes you achieve with your modifications?
- arsome 6y agohttps://github.com/keylase/nvidia-patch https://github.com/keylase/nvidia-patch Basically just lets my Plex server transcode more streams at once without having a Quadro.
- canada_dry 6y ago> my Plex server transcode more streams at once And... why do you need your Plex server transcoding multiple streams? Just curious!
- arsome 6y agoI've got many users on it and 3 or 4 simultaneous streams is not an uncommon occurrence. Nvenc is artificially limited to 2 on consumer cards.
- crtasm 6y agoThought I was reading https://developer.nvidia.com/video-encode-and-decode-gpu-support-matrix-new https://developer.nvidia.com/video-encode-and-decode-gpu-sup... wrong but turns out they raised the limit to 3 last year. https://techgage.com/news/nvidia-bumps-nvenc-stream-limit-on-geforce-from-two-to-three/ https://techgage.com/news/nvidia-bumps-nvenc-stream-limit-on...
- herendin2 6y agoNvidia is effectively incentivizing the cracking of their driver and firmware security signing with millions of dollars. Because a person who cracks it can build a more profitable mining farm It's a sort of accidental bug bounty and I wonder if Nvidia have really thought this through?