31 ms·
GeForce RTX 3060 Ethereum Mining Restrictions Have Been Broken
- _Understated_ 6y agoMy take on this is that Nvidia knew fine well that their code would be broken. And in short order too. I reckon this was just lip-service to consumers, and possibly their investors, that they're "doing something about those bad cryptominers that are making us loads of money". Plus, whenever something is marketed as unbreakable, I picture guys reading it saying "Oh really? Challenge accepted!"
- Ballas 6y agoWell, in this case it looks like NVIDIA themselves broke the restrictions - or at least they are not present in the beta drivers.
- jperry 6y agoThey crippled their Geforce cards in terms of mining while simultaneously launching different, more expensive, dedicated mining cards[0]. [0] https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/cmp/ https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/cmp/
- ziml77 6y agoIt's possible those cards are being made with chips that are too defective to output video. Unfortunately only Nvidia knows for sure and they're not going to say anything truthful about it.
- Rule35 6y agoIf the cards were cheaper, or even the same price but available, then I doubt there'd be an outcry. But they charge more, for a surely defective part. It'd be like buying a car and finding a clause that says if you manage to make money off of it they'll take a percentage or "brick" the hatch or something, to prevent your profitable usage. Nvidia should back the fuck off and just sell a product.
- rcxdude 6y agoEven if they were cheaper miners wouldn't like them: one thing which substantially reduces miners' operating costs is the resale value of the GPUs they are using. They can buy a GPU, mine on it for a year or two, and then sell it for ~50% of its original value (or even higher in today's markets). The mining cards with zero resale value (which will much more quickly become landfill) would need to be substantially cheaper to make this worthwhile.
- Rule35 6y agoRight. But if they openly sold defective half-finished cards for mining they'd still be less popular products but people wouldn't feel insulted.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- paulmd 6y agoAll of the mining card SKUs except one were confirmed to be using older Turing-based architecture on a completely different fab and node (and one that's not currently bottlenecked to the same extent as TSMC 7nm/Samsung 8nm are). So they are not harvested silicon, but they also don't compete for fab time either.
- SloopJon 6y agoI haven't seen any pricing on the CMP cards yet. Are you sure they're more expensive?
- paulmd 6y agoI would assume they would be. Miners price hardware based on the hashrate, resale value is nice as a safety but serious miners aren't figuring on dumping all their hardware the first time price drops a little bit. Take a look at the data compiled by Tom's Hardware and you'll see the 3060 Ti has a 51% price premium over the 3060 on ebay. That is the "mining premium" in action. The 3060 is a bit slower on paper but it mines pretty much as well. https://www.tomshardware.com/news/gpu-pricing-index https://www.tomshardware.com/news/gpu-pricing-index As such, if the mining cards mine twice as fast, they're twice as valuable to miners, and they'll pay twice as much for them. Pricing them less than gaming cards is leaving money on the table and completely unnecessary when they'll sell anyway.
- babypuncher 6y agoIf they could actually enforce this then I would be all for it. Crypto mining is the biggest and most pointless waste of energy since nuclear weapons testing. All these crypto miners are just making the planet hotter, while pissing off people who have more legitimate uses for these cards but cannot realistically obtain one because they are being hogged by the miners.
- panzagl 6y agoNuclear weapons testing kept us from using nuclear weapons, worth it.
- px43 6y agoWho is "us"? Surely you don't mean the USA. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atomic_bombings_of_Hiroshima_and_Nagasaki https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atomic_bombings_of_Hiroshima_a...
- filoleg 6y agoThe event you are linking to was the real world "test" of nuclear weapons. And quite a lot of people attribute the lack of real world "testing" of nuclear weapons since then to that specific event.
- px43 6y agoEh, the vast majority of these cards are used by people who are rendering fantasy worlds so they can run around pretending to be an elf, or a soldier, or some other stupid thing. Lots of them are full grown adults too, just wasting time that they could be doing something meaningful with. That's way WAY dumber than powering a next generation global financial infrastructure.
- madamelic 6y agoWow, that's new. A cryptocurrency proponent who hates video games.
- 6y ago
- cinntaile 6y agoPerhaps this segmentation has some contractual clauses that effectively bans companies from buying gaming cards to mine with? They're not enforceable everywhere in the world, but if it covers a big chunk of the cryptomining world then that's probably good enough. That way they can charge a premium for mining cards.
- kmeisthax 6y agoNvidia already did this once before: their driver license specifically prohibits you from using GeForce cards in datacenters. Only Tesla-branded cards (no, not the car maker) are licensed for use in a datacenter. The license is pretty much unavoidable, even if you're using Nouveau, because the cards won't work at all unless you give it's power-management processor an Nvidia-signed binary to run, and Nvidia won't sign Free replacements for that binary.
- paulmd 6y agoMining operations are pretty fucking sketch for the most part (in china they just straight-up steal electricity) and miners won't care about terms of service in the same way that a billion-dollar corporation would. You're not going to get ratted out by the secretary and have all your assets siezed, short of requiring an always-on internet connection and ratting the user out for mining (which would be incredibly unpopular) there's not a whole lot you can do, it's all possible to do stealthily.
- libertine 6y agoAt this point NVIDIA seems to be motivated by shareholders value, and nothing else. They shifted part of their production capacity to release dedicated cards for mining that have way shorter life-cycle, because they can't be used by anyone else. They found a way to sell more cards with a higher price tag.
- bayindirh 6y ago> At this point NVIDIA seems to be motivated by shareholders value, and nothing else. It's for a long time. This is just the latest layer.
- libertine 6y agoYou're right!
- xwdv 6y agoWhat’s wrong with that? Being an NVDA shareholder isn’t some select privilege for an elite few. Just buy the stock. I’m currently holding an NVDA position worth over $300k off a modest investment I made 5 years ago. To attack companies for delivering value to shareholders is just jealousy, and speaks ignorance of the market.
- ohgodplsno 6y ago>modest investment >$300k You live in a reality that is much different than most Americans, Europeans or Asians. Reasonably, the average person can maybe get a single share, and being willing or able to blow $500 on a single share is rare. Get back down to earth, you're part of an extremely privileged group of people that fully benefits from your shares, while actual customers do not get to see returns. Putting money in a company is not work. You are not owed anything.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- 6y ago
- maxden 6y agoI thought they were trying to stop used up cryptominer cards from flooding the graphics card market. So this doesn't help Nvidia in that respect.
- ziml77 6y agoI don't know why they thought that would work for their marketing though. Every tech news source I follow saw right through that. And it was reasonable to be upset at the restriction because someone buying the card for their gaming machine would be the most affected if they wanted to try to make back some of the cost of the card by mining when their computer is idle.
- simias 6y agoIt was my understanding that you need very cheap electricity for cryptomining to be worth it, am I mistaken? If not I suspect that most people don't really have a good incentive to mine coins, unless the use it to heat up their flat or something (and assuming that they don't have more efficient heating available).
- etrautmann 6y agoAs a technical point.
- Rule35 6y agoEvery penny spent on electric heat would be more efficiently spent mining.
- simias 6y agoNot necessarily, if you have access to a heat pump for instance you could get much more efficient and cheap heating than a mining rig would offer you. You could also be heating your home using natural gas or some other resources costing a lot less than electricity in some markets. Being able to reuse the heat from mining does make it easier to break even of course, but given how competitive the sector is I doubt that it's enough to offset the costs in most places.
- Rule35 6y agoYes, a heat pump would be better. I was thinking of what most renters have available - baseboards and portable heaters. Cover the costs, maybe not. Offset, certainly.
- simias 6y agoI was also wondering why nvidia felt the need to step in. Selling cards is selling cards, having too much demand doesn't seem like a problem they should want solved. Sure it does incur some PR cost as gamers are frustrated not to be able to purchase the cards, but I doubt it really damages their brand in the long term, and AFAIK AMD also faces similar issues so it's not like it massively benefits the competition. If I were nvidia I'd be cynically very happy that miners are buying my cards in droves. What am I missing?
- etrautmann 6y agoThere is the issue that miners tend to dump the used cards on the market much sooner than a gamer would.
- kevingadd 6y agoAlso quite toxic for your brand, since those used cards may have been run under high power loads and at high temperatures for a long time - the card may wear out sooner and make the gamer unhappy that it was "unreliable" and they wasted their money
- lmohseni 6y agoMiners undervolt their cards so as to run cooler and under a lower load.
- elorant 6y agoYou forget the other part of the equation. Gaming companies. If gamers can't get their hands on decent hardware they'll stop buying games altogether. Thus the pressure doesn't come from consumers alone.
- Rule35 6y agoThey anticipated selling stripped down cards to miners for a higher price. If they wanted gamers to have these cards they would just give out purchase invites via gaming hardware sites like Gamer's Nexus. They already make deals to supply OEMs before general retail, so all the gaming hardware being build is getting a supply either way.
- IshKebab 6y ago> I reckon this was just lip-service to consumers Nope, this is price discrimination so that Bitcoin miners buy their more expensive mining card. They don't want this to be broken. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Price_discrimination https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Price_discrimination
- zokier 6y agoEven if they knew that it will be broken quickly (which I also assume they did), it wasn't still necessarily lip service; even slight deterrence against miners during launch probably helped to get more cards in the hands of gamers, which was the intention. Of course it is impossible to know how big of an impact it really had, but I'd like to think it had at least some for the so important launch day orders.
- capableweb 6y ago> which was the intention Neither me, _Understated_ or you know exactly why nvidia did what they did. What we do know, is that ultimately they answer to their shareholders and they have to show profit. Their motivations for why they do the things they do, can usually be boiled down to: "because it makes us more money". Nvidia probably doesn't care where the graphic cards go, miners or gamers, as they still make the same amount of money.
- __s 6y agoYou can want brand loyalty. If Nvidia cards are soaked up in mining & game devs start optimizing more heavily for AMD gpus, suddenly Nvidia loses market capture of gaming gpus & end up at the whim of crypto. Miners are also much less brand loyal, someone comes out with a better hashrate/$ card & you've lost your customers So there's arguments for miners not being a diverse customer base that would encourage wanting to keep gamers in line. But I'm saying this without knowing any details, so I don't know
- zokier 6y agoThere is also the thing that nvidia wants to get people on board the RTX train as quickly as possible, that is fairly long term strategic initiative. And miners absolutely do not help there.
- albertgoeswoof 6y agoGamers will be around in 10 years, miners might not be
- amelius 6y ago> Plus, whenever something is marketed as unbreakable, I picture guys reading it saying "Oh really? Challenge accepted!" https://www.roadtovr.com/developer-reward-jailbreak-quest-2/ https://www.roadtovr.com/developer-reward-jailbreak-quest-2/ > Oculus Founder to Match $5,000 Reward for Anyone Who Can Jailbreak Quest 2
- vmception 6y agoI came here to write this comment Nvidia gets to blame the "super tech savvy crypto hackers" while printing revenue through the roof
- paulmd 6y agoNo they don't. They acknowledged they released the beta driver themselves that didn't have the mining brake.
- ccmcarey 6y agoThere's also the fact that a few days ago Nvidia released a signed driver that disabled the restrictions [1] _by accident_. But now that the signed driver is out, anyone can just revert to that at any time and mine whatever they want. Fantastic failure to a flawed endeavour. [1] https://www.theverge.com/2021/3/16/22333544/nvidia-rtx-3060-ethereum-mining-rate-limit-unlock-driver https://www.theverge.com/2021/3/16/22333544/nvidia-rtx-3060-...
- Shadonototro 6y agoi'm pretty sure they did this to prevent a class-action lawsuit limiting a product after a purchase, i'm pretty sure this is illegal
- mschuster91 6y ago> limiting a product after a purchase, i'm pretty sure this is illegal NVIDIA announced this limit prior to public availability and it made widespread news, meaning everyone who bought a 3060 could reasonably be expected to know about the restriction. No chance for a class action.
- belltaco 6y agoPlus Nvidia can offer a full refund of the MSRP, fully knowing that even used cards go for more.
- Shadonototro 6y agosource?
- mschuster91 6y agoA month ago on HN, for example (a couple dupes were merged into that iirc): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26180260 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26180260
- nikanj 6y ago
- HugoDaniel 6y agoThis could drive the bigger question of the feasibility of hardware imposed restrictions.
- TechBro8615 6y agoNot quite the 3 days after release predicted in the original thread, but impressive and entirely unsurprising nonetheless.
- jleahy 6y agoI got my first even downvotes for suggestion that it would be rapidly cracked in that thread, followed by a lot of 'Nvidia is full of smart people' comments. There always seems to be a persistent optimism for the effectiveness of this kind of thing. For example how long DRM or anti-piracy methods on games will be effective for.
- Jonnax 6y agoIt wasn't cracked. Nvidia released a driver which didn't do the restriction.
- anaganisk 6y agoEither they're smart enough to "accidentally" release that driver, or they're actually "smart" enough to accidentally release the driver.
- tehbeard 6y ago> Nvidia is full of smart people If that were truly the case I wouldn't have to deal with multiple fuck ups caused by Nvidia releasing drivers with improper signing (windows seems fine with it, but virtualbox runs into issues with it due to hardening checks.)
- anaganisk 6y agoWait till you meet google engineers here, who say "we give a lot of thought, and we know better" Here on HN I frequently notice that people fail to recognise, end of day, to err is human. Agendas change.
- Findeton 6y agoThese mining restrictions are... interesting, given that Ethereum is about to move towards staking rather soon anyway ..
- nootropicat 6y ago>soon The earliest likely merge date is Q1 2022. The only exception is if the situation is urgent (miners attacking, or nicehash having a dangerously high percentage of hash) - in this situation the merge itself could be done in a month I think.
- falcolas 6y agoI’ve been hearing this - “moving towards stakes soon” - for at least a year now.
- Rule35 6y agoThey have it running, and people are making money off of it. The difficulty now is social, convincing people to switch.
- qeternity 6y agoNo, it’s commercial: convincing the miners to switch who obviously have a vested interest in perpetuating PoW
- pcthrowaway 6y agoThe miners don't need to switch; in fact, they can't. There's no mining on the PoS network. Miners will effectively have to stay on ETH1 or move to another cryptocurrency. I think it's largely political, getting stake pool nodes and people using ETH2. There will likely be ETH1 and ETH2 running side by side for some time. ETH1 can be burned to get ETH2, so there's a one-way transition (though I'm not sure if this story is complete yet, that's the plan anyway).
- 6y ago
- sandworm101 6y agoNew idea: Break the cards. A gamer doesn't need mathematical perfection. 99% of gamers wouldn't care if a card game rendered something slightly off, a pixel or two out of place on a 8k screen. A slight mathematical error wouldn't be noticed. But that same math error would destroy any mining efforts. So I propose that, rather than feeble attempts at software-based DRM, that Nvidea actually break the cards. Add in a tiny math error that gamers won't care about but that will render the cards useless for anything requiring exact calculation. This would of course be very difficult to design.
- pjc50 6y agoIntel managed this accidentally with the FDIV bug: for certain very specific values, floating point division gave the wrong answer. Then there was the traditional rigged demo solution; one generation of cards behaved differently when the program running was named QUAKE.EXE. That is now almost standard, since part of the reason NVIDIA driver downloads are so large is a huge pack of compatibility tweaks for specific games.
- simias 6y agoModern engines render scenes in multiple passes, iterating over the same framebuffer until everything has been rendered. Engineering such a flaw in a way that wouldn't lead to dramatic cascading effect will indeed be very difficult to design. Note that sometimes games do need absolutely exact results, or at the very least reproducible results. For instance sometimes you want to use something like `glDepthFunc(GL_LEQUAL)` which will only accept a fragment if its depth is equal to the depth buffer's value. A small fudging here would cause potentially large visual issues. I'm not saying it's impossible but I expect that it would create a lot of headache as random, potentially unmaintained games would start glitching here and there.
- tpxl 6y agoWhich would also make the cards useless for any GPGPU workloads.
- tantalor 6y ago
- jy3 6y agoCan anyone enlighten and explain why there were restrictions in the first place?
- nullifidian 6y agoThe official reason is availability -- it's nigh impossible for a gamer to buy a GPU right now for something close to MSRP. The real reason is probably a desire to prevent miners from selling their GPUs on the second hand market, thus increasing sales of new GPUs.
- zokier 6y agoNvidia is still trying to fulfill orders for 3080 from launch day. The availability problem is real. They do not need to artificially increase the demand for their GPUs if they already are selling way more than they can deliver.
- arianon 6y agoThat's true today, but will it remain true when the cryptocurrency bull run ends, we enter a bear market, and mining becomes far less profitable? Not just that, but the most profitable coin to mine, Ethereum, is on track to move away from Proof-of-Work, so we can expect a lot of second-hand cards to be sold at fire-sale prices in 2022.
- madamelic 6y agoThe problem isn't miners. The problem is no one wants to stop bots and scalpers from buying them en masse. If eBay prevented scalping and e-commerce created bot protections, demand would stop being absurd. Nvidia stopped selling cards on their site because they couldn't figure out how to prevent bots from buying them all. Not to mention Nvidia is selling cards directly to large miners by the pallet load.
- chickenpotpie 6y agoI don’t think scalpers can drive up prices long term. What’s the difference between all the scalpers having the cards and nvidia having the cards? Either way people are only going to pay what the card is worth to them. If cryptocurrency miners buy the cards, they’re not reselling them.
- pjc50 6y agoSo, does anyone have any technical details on how this works? Both what the block was in the first place and how it was defeated? I imagine it has something to do with how Etherum is mostly integer math and boolean operations for hashing, while gaming workloads tend to be floating point, but I'm just guessing. Another factor in the background: the pandemic has caused a worldwide fab capacity shortage. Lots of manufacturers are running around with their hair on fire trying to book fab slots. Even car production is being held up due to IC shortages.
- etrautmann 6y agoIsn’t this less due to Covid than to increased demand from different sectors like automotive, etc?
- ev1 6y agoApparently it's gotten even worse in the last month, since Samsung and NXP's fabs are in winter-blizzard-disaster Texas, and TSMC is in a once-in-a-century level of drought area
- wmf 6y agoMost of Samsung's fabs are in South Korea; the Austin fab is a minority of their production.
- paulmd 6y agoI heard that as of last week Samsung's texas facilities are still not back up - when they lost power they also basically lost containment of their materials (most of which are ultra-pure and require special handling) and pressure for the cleanroom itself (so they have to clean and re-sanitize the whole thing). https://www.extremetech.com/computing/320511-samsungs-austin-foundry-is-still-offline-more-than-two-weeks-later https://www.extremetech.com/computing/320511-samsungs-austin... Turns out maybe that setting up your factory in a libertarian tax haven that went out of its way to prevent grid interconnects that would have allowed power delivery to continue, in order to forego enforcement of federal regulations that would have prevented these outages in the first place, might not have been such a great idea. But muh Texas, "did you know we have the right to secede!?" So cool! /s
- pyrox420 6y agoNo one could have seen that coming... No one!
- ai_ja_nai 6y agoThese miners are really getting on my nerves: not only they are polluting the planet (1% of electricity in 2018 was for cryptomining), but are driving off the budgets of whole deep learning practitioners
- Dma54rhs 6y agoPC gaming alone wastes the same amount of energy. There are also consoles and the whole industry of game creators surrounding it. In my eyes they are both useless and pollute. Some get kick out of games, some out shitcoins.
- cheeze 6y agoHuge difference between running a graphics card at 100% capacity (ok, most eth miners underclock but still use a good amount of wattage close to 100% of the time) and someone playing a video game for a few hours after work one day. Nowhere near the same amount of energy. Gaming certainly doesn't use 1% of the planets energy, for example...
- Dma54rhs 6y agoIt does - https://www.researchgate.net/publication/285396475_Taming_the_energy_use_of_gaming_computers https://www.researchgate.net/publication/285396475_Taming_th...
- FridgeSeal 6y agoThe number of people with high-powered gaming machines-as described in that paper- is comparatively small, and their sustained energy use would be a fraction of what crypto-currencies waste. Moreover, socially games are probably less damaging and they’re not attempting to strip money off people in large volumes.
- Dma54rhs 6y agoIt says 120tw/h a year right there, which is the same as bitcoin now. Do you think it's a bogus paper or what are arguing against? I agree with the criticism about bitcoin, I just find gaming industry as useless burning carbon and trying to milk money from the naive.
- varispeed 6y agoIn my opinion they set their prices too low and have not invested enough in fabs. The demand now way exceeds their capability to manufacture and unfortunately the only way to "restart" is to set prices to a level that will allow building the capacity to satisfy the demand at lower price point. They can try doing those PR tricks, but they'll just waste even more money without addressing the problem.
- my123 6y agoNVIDIA doesn’t own any fabs, they don’t really have a choice.
- mywittyname 6y agoInterestingly. I was watching some interviews with the founders of 3DFX, and when asked about why the company died, their straight answer was: because they bought a fab.
- DaiPlusPlus 6y agoI thought it was because 3DFX started to compete with their own hardware partners? 3dfx was a chipset vendor - whether or not they fab their own chips shouldn't matter all-that-much: it's who makes and sells the boards that counts. The Voodoo1 and early Voodoo2 cards were made, packaged, and sold by hardware partners like Creative, Diamond, etc - but with the Voodoo3 and later SKUs of the Voodoo2, 3dfx did it all by themselves, so why would the miffed Creative Labs and Diamond lend their sales channel expertise to 3dfx? PC OEMs like Dell, HP, etc also probably had deals with Creative for their Sound Blaster, and it wouldn't surprise me if Creative politely asked them to not buy 3dfx-made boards in exchange for a sweet discount on Sound Blaster cards...
- mywittyname 6y agoYes, exactly this, they bought STB Systems and began manufacturing their own boards. I wasn't sure how much of the manufacturing process this entailed.
- Voloskaya 6y ago"The GPU maker seemed confident that its restrictions couldn’t be defeated, even claiming it wasn’t just a driver holding back performance. “It’s not just a driver thing,” said Bryan Del Rizzo, Nvidia’s head of communications, last month. “There is a secure handshake between the driver, the RTX 3060 silicon, and the BIOS (firmware) that prevents removal of the hash rate limiter.”"[1] Funny how it turned out to just be a driver thing. [1]: https://www.theverge.com/2021/3/16/22333544/nvidia-rtx-3060-ethereum-mining-rate-limit-unlock-driver https://www.theverge.com/2021/3/16/22333544/nvidia-rtx-3060-...
- serf 6y ago>Funny how it turned out to just be a driver thing. sort of makes one wonder how many whizz-bang hardware features get advertised that are little more than just software, but are oversold as unique physical engineering methods/techniques.
- bitL 6y agoYou meant NVidia Quadro/Titan workstation performance?
- DaiPlusPlus 6y agoI understand that pretty much the only difference between $3000+ "professional" GPUs that get certified for AutoCAD and other workstation systems are identical to $1000 "gaming" GPUs, just with a different on-card BIOS/firmware and e-fuses. I remember ages ago that people were able to simply re-flash their ATI Radeons into FirePro cards and that unlocked higher performance in some applications. Same thing with Cisco switches for port-unlocks and Tesla cars (EAP and FSD are just software features, assuming you have HW2+, and rear heated seats are standard, just not activated unless you pay to enable it if you didn't get the cold-weather package when you ordered it).
- taf2 6y agosorta similar to cars that can get over the air updates and suddenly accelerate from 0 60 faster then before...
- ur-whale 6y agoExactly as predicted the day the NVidia announcement came out. And a good thing too.
- coolspot 6y agoNow if someone could enable full CUDA on RTX 3060/3070/3080, that would be noice! And multi-stream video encoding while we are at it.
- unclekev 6y ago> Now if someone could enable full CUDA on RTX 3060/3070/3080, that would be noice! I thought there were no CUDA limits on the RTX 3070/3080/3090 cards? I've got a 3080 from launch and have not noticed any artificial caps or performance issues when doing CUDA-related things.
- coolspot 6y agoAFAIK double-precision performance is artificially crippled on consumer RTX cards to differentiate from professional Quadro and Tesla. https://www.techpowerup.com/forums/threads/nerfed-fp64-performance-in-consumer-gpu-cards.272732/ https://www.techpowerup.com/forums/threads/nerfed-fp64-perfo...
- CivBase 6y agoHopefully they give up on the idea for future cards. NVIDIA shouldn't decide what I can do with my GPU.
- GuB-42 6y agoThat's the same idea as for GeForce/Quadro. Gaming GPUs are crippled so that they work poorly with professional software (ex: CAD). AMD does the same thing with Radeon/FirePro. I don't expect Nvidia to give up on that. And to be honest, for me personally, it is a good thing. I don't mine and I don't CAD, having GPUs unavailable for the former and overpriced for the latter results in more affordable prices for myself.
- wvenable 6y agoApple is laughing at this comment.
- kjjjjjjjjjjjjjj 6y agoAh yes, a secure platform is the same as an aftermarket graphics card. Boy I wish I could disable SIP on my mac and then boot whatever I want or install whatever kernel extensions I want... oh wait. I can!
- dheera 6y agoHell can we modify Tesla cars to mine Ethereum when it's not in self-driving mode?
- tracerbulletx 6y agocool cool cool. I never wanted a new video card anyways.
- ohiovr 6y agoThat took longer than I thought it would.
- russellbeattie 6y agoMy god, this whole thing went pear shaped so fast, it's incredible. I bet this launch will be taught in B-schools as a lesson for would be marketers. Nvidia seemed to be doing the right thing at first, taking the concerns of their most enthusiastic customers seriously and doing something about it. Given how badly the company usually treats their customers, it seemed like a nice gesture. Then the Internet trolls came out and accused the company of just giving the issue lip service, since it was obviously just a software fix, it wouldn't really stop the big crypto farms from using the cards. Nvidia is evil, as per normal. Then the company responds with a lie, that it's actually a hardware implementation. No one believed it, but that's their story. Nvidia is trying to do the right thing. Then all the gamers - most of whom aren't even in the market for a RTX 3060 - start flipping out about how the resale of the cards is going to be lower because they're all nerfed. So by charging full price for the card anyways, Nvidia is actually ripping them off!! Nvidia is evil again. Then this screwups happens and everyone now is screeching about how they knew it all along and Nvidia is actually lying about EVERYTHING!! Maybe they're creating artificial shortages in the first place! It's all a conspiracy man!! I don't think I've ever seen an reasonable idea like this go tits up so fast. Remember when Netflix announced Quickster and it bit them in the ass so hard they had to cancel the whole spinoff? This is what this reminds me of: Good intentions badly implemented.
- ghego1 6y agoI'm not too surprised. I think it's in Nvidia best interest both to claim that the hash limit is unbreakable, but at the same time also make it breackable
- silly-silly 6y agoIf you wanted to really limit it to gamers, why not partner with steam/origin/etc and have them pass out tokens to buyers for use with vendors based on previous gameplay history. This of course requires vendors to also play with this scheme, which I'm not sure NVIDIA has the clout to ensure that point-of-sale people can enforce this.
- hourislate 6y agoAhh the old "lets make it look like a mistake and release a driver that unlocks the mining restrictions". Maybe I'm old and cynical but does anyone actually think this was an error on NVIDIA part? Their goal is to sell as much GPU as they can, their shareholders wouldn't want it any other way. My opinion is it was a convenient mistake that will sell a lot more cards.
- paulmd 6y ago> Maybe I'm old and cynical but does anyone actually think this was an error on NVIDIA part? Yes. And I assume we'll see the mining brake return on 3080 Ti / 3080 Super and on 4000 series cards as well. This looks very much to me like someone built a feature branch on an old version that didn't have the mining brake installed, and then pushed the branch somewhere they shouldn't. I see no reason to doubt that - classic case of Hanlon's Razor in action: "never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity". > Their goal is to sell as much GPU as they can, their shareholders wouldn't want it any other way. Segmenting miners to a different, higher-priced segment makes them more money. You're selling two cards instead of one, on top of increasing your effective production capacity (because the mining cards are on a different, older node that is not bottlenecked as badly).
- Priem19 6y agoI wish I could reply with a nuanced take, but I can't. Ban these cryptocurrency pyramid schemes already. https://www.cynicusrex.com/file/cryptocultscience.html https://www.cynicusrex.com/file/cryptocultscience.html
- peanut_worm 6y agoI think it’s safe to assume that PC gaming is dead for the immediate future or until Ethereum moves away from mining
- yellowapple 6y agoCalled it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26188700 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26188700