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Nvidia cripples cryptocurrency mining on RTX 3080 and 3070 cards
- pdimitar 5y agoI never planned to mine cryptocurrency but such a move sends a very bad message to me as an end user. Fine, NVIDIA. I planned to have a dedicated Win10 gaming PC with an RTX 3090 and a separate Linux workstation but I guess it's better if I just get the Threadripper Pro workstation and equip it with an AMD 6900XT and do both my work and gaming under Linux. Will spend 40-50% less money, too. And Steam is getting better and better at gaming under Linux with each passing week so the Linux users automatically get in a better position with time. If that's how you want to play, good luck to you, NVIDIA. You just lost a future customer.
- oh_sigh 5y agoWhy would them diminishing a certain aspect that you admittedly never planned on using in the first place affect your decision? Does your work involve computing millions of hashes, but isn't cryptocurrency?
- pdimitar 5y agoNo, my work doesn't involve that at all. It just sends the signal to me as a customer that they can limit what I do with something that I bought and is supposedly now mine. It's a slippery slope kind of situation where you don't know what else they might figure they'll want to limit in the future. I am not okay with that so I'll vote with my wallet.
- SXX 5y agoNvidia never applied those mining limitations rectoactivelyl they only announced for newer cards. Still they crippled VFIO capabilities with driver updates in past so they had bad track of record years ago.
- pdimitar 5y agoYep, that's what worries me. They are cautious for now but if they don't meet pushback (or a financial hit) they might get bolder and start applying more and more restrictions. This is likely too paranoid for many but the technical possibility is there and believing in the good heart of a huge business is to me not a sound strategy.
- wbraun 5y agoDoes this behavior anger anyone else on a deep level? I get that its hard to buy GPUs right now, but this seems like such an attack on general purpose computing. Hardware manufactures already segment features between consumer and busness grade parts that the silicon itself is capable of, such as virtualization, but restricting what algorithms one can run is a whole new level. I am pretty sure my next GPU is going to be AMD due to this behavior by Nvidia.
- creato 5y agoIt is unfortunate, but it is less unfortunate than the behavior of crypto miners. Freedom is great when people aren't using their freedom to infringe on other people's freedom.
- arthurcolle 5y agoHow is someone mining on GPUs they bought themselves infringing on your freedom, pray tell?
- belltaco 5y agoThe extra power usage is destroying our planet all for someone to try and make a quick buck, and causing shortages of GPUs during a pandemic where mental health from entertainment like gaming is valuable and stops people from going outside and getting/spreading the virus. The incentives for crypto all are f'ed up right now. The ETH PoS switch can't come soon enough.
- fastball 5y agoWhat if you're only mining with renewables? And I'd actually like to see a study on the positive mental health benefit of gaming, because I'm skeptical. Also the idea that you need a primo GPU in order to game is a bit silly. And if you're the kind of person that absolutely needs the best graphics in order to enjoy gaming, please see my point no. 2 about mental health.
- inetsee 5y agoDidn't Nvidia try this on some different cards recently? And wasn't it only about a week before there was a patch that undid what Nvidia had done?
- ihuman 5y agoThey only tried it on a version of the 3060, and they accidentally released a driver without LHR.
- plttn 5y agoMy unfounded speculation is that the 3060Ti limiter (which was mostly bypassed due to an accidental leak of dev drivers) acted as a bit of a test balloon to see how it would be attacked before implementing it on the 3070/3080 silicon.
- Scoundreller 5y agoI wonder if the « accidental » release was to avoid the motivation for a massive lawsuit. If apple can get sued for « excessive » throttling when batteries lose peak cranking amps, nvidia would fare much worse.
- simion314 5y ago>If apple can get sued for « excessive » throttling when batteries lose peak cranking amps You are missing the main part, "Apple downgraded your CPU behind your back" which is very different then "The iPhone box clearly mentions that when the battery is low the CPU will throttle and a notification is shown". It seems the fanboys managed to trick you in believing that Apple is the victim here.
- rhema 5y agoWhy not the 3090? What's the logic?
- zokier 5y ago3090 availability is relatively good at the moment.
- gradys 5y agoThis has very much not been my experience in the US.
- irq 5y agoIs it? I haven't seen one in stock in a long time. People are setting up sniping programs to auto-buy them.
- 1-6 5y agoRelative is a broad statement depending on where you live. In the US, Newegg has been going in-and-out of stock but mostly out.
- ipsum2 5y agoI'd love to see a few links. I haven't been able to purchase them, checked Amazon, Best Buy, and newegg.
- belltaco 5y agoThe extra cost over the 3080 is probably not worth the minor increase in the hash rate for mining.
- Kirby64 5y agoCost is roughly 2x (at MSRP/inflated MSRP) over a 3080, so if you can buy a 3080 there's no reason to buy a 3090 for hashing. Hashrate is something like 20-30% more than a 3080.
- mywittyname 5y agoDrive miners to the high priced cards while leaving the price/performance market for gamers.
- tristanj 5y agoContext: Back in February, Nvidia also restricted cryptocurrency mining on their RTX 3060 cards. The restrictions were bypassed a month later https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26475596 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26475596 Related HN Discussions: Nvidia announces mining GPUs, cuts the hash rate of RTX-3060 in half https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26180260 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26180260 (461 points, 746 comments) Nvidia Limits RTX 3060 Hash Rate https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26192201 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26192201 (280 points, 509 comments) AMD refuses to limit cryptocurrency mining: We will not be blocking any workload https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26524387 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26524387 (68 points, 53 comments)
- cerved 5y agohuh, so this is why I've been seeing HDMI plugs that supposedly double the hashrate of 3060s How is this even implemented?
- Grimm1 5y agoCan't drive people to the mining cards they've released if you have everyone using the consumer hardware. As someone who really likes the performance and ecosystem around NVIDIA cards this makes me happy, because I'll probably be able to own one sometime before the heat death of the universe if trends like this continue. But, "To help get GeForce GPUs in the hands of gamers," Is a load of crock. They have a new mining focused product line they want miners purchasing and they get the convenience of the nice gamer PR from this to run it behind. Company gonna company. I'm not saying it's a bad thing by the way, just don't think they're all pro gamer or doing it for reasons besides money.
- ericmay 5y agoCan't it be both? Seems like a win-win for Nvidia and gamers. I can genuinely see a company like Nvidia getting a lot of customer feedback and maybe employees actually caring that gamers can get their hands on Nvidia's cards.
- rundevilrun 5y agocompanies are people too!
- cerved 5y agoGlobo Chem "We own everything so you don't have to"
- erjiang 5y agoIt makes sense to me that gamers as a market are more likely to be brand-loyal and gaming is also more moat-able than hashing. For miners, they just want whatever does more hashes per second. There's no loyalty there and the hardware is competing solely on hash/power/cost. For gaming, you have proprietary software and APIs like "RTX"-branded stuff, game-specific driver optimizations, etc. where you can better defend yourself against AMD. So for Nvidia, if they're going to sell X GPUs either way, they'd rather sell to gamers than miners to help preserve their gaming market share which plausibly has more long-term value. Just my guess, at least.
- jti107 5y agointeresting philosophical question that intersects with "right to repair" and "ownership of digital purchases". when you buy a product does the company get to dictate what you can do with it.
- Kranar 5y agoWhen you buy a product? No. When you purchase a license agreement for software that the product depends on? Yes.
- orky56 5y agoIt's not quite so clear cut. Less and less hardware solutions can meaningfully exist without some software for it to provide the functions it was meant for when purchased. This is a slippery slope that brings together the right to repair & net neutrality law type arguments.
- gruez 5y agoSo apple restricting iphone repairs (by breaking camera/fingerprint reader, or nagging you about the battery/display) is totally fine because it's done in software?
- skytreader 5y agoTotal hardware noob here. How do they do it? Is there a particular instruction that ETH needs to be "efficient" but games can live with throttled? Or perhaps a sequence of instructions that's signature to ETH?
- Scoundreller 5y agoGoing to be a fun future game of cat-and-mouse as miners figure out how to disable/bypass nvidia’s electronic countermeasures.
- Alekhine 5y agoIt'll be a good opportunity to see some nice hardware hacks, sure. But I'd guess serious miners don't really wanna deal with that shit and will just buy the miner-specific cards or use ASICs. This measure just raises the bar enough to make it a hassle.
- HappySweeney 5y agoSerious miners will go to great lengths to improve their efficiency by even a fraction of 1%. They will absolutely patch some drivers if it gets them better hashes/kwh (which it will or Nvidia wouldn't do this).
- valuearb 5y agoSerious miners are buying Antminers, not video cards.
- Franciscouzo 5y agoAntminers are for mining Bitcoin, GPUs are mostly used for Ethereum.
- paulmd 5y ago
- Zenst 5y agoI find the prospect of being able to add more overhead and potential bugs into a product to remove a niche functionality in a move that reeks of PR marketing driven solution, too be of bad taste. Whilst the overhead will be so small I doubt it will be measurable, it still is not zero and only adds the possibility that some workloads of non crypto currency origins fall foul of this in ways that may not be easy to discern.
- Quick2822 5y agoI'm not sure its niche. ETH is the 2nd most popular crypto with a $394,657,267,540 market cap at $3,403.15 per as of the timestamp.
- Vespasian 5y agoIt's a niche for GPU usage when compared to gaming, rendering, video editing, machine learning. And it's most likely a really short lived niche
- saiya-jin 5y ago> a niche functionality That's kind of a bullcrap, since this 'niche' functionality completely crippled graphic card sales, and negative effects will ripple through PC gaming markets for quite some time. Every gamer that didn't manage to snatch one before is pissed beyond funny. Imagine a gaming studio that is deciding to develop a next-gen game - why would they try hard to go for / optimize for PC version if there are very few actual owners of good cards? Produce either generic all-platform-compatible stuff or abandon PC market altogether.
- oh_sigh 5y ago"Niche functionality" that is ballooning the price of their graphics cards for end users? > adds the possibility that some workloads of non crypto currency origins fall foul of this in ways that may not be easy to discern. So what? The proof is in the pudding. You buy things as they are sold, not with some kind of expectation that you can achieve 100% of the theoretical performance of some ideal version of the product. If I buy a car with a limiter that doesn't let me go over 100mph, I shouldn't be surprised or upset that I can't hit 105 mph.
- o_p 5y agoHow hard can it be to reverse engineer the drivers and remove the protections? Theres economic incentive now after all
- MauranKilom 5y ago"remove" how? The card BIOS is not going to let you just flash any random driver you cooked up.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- TameAntelope 5y agoDoes this mean my pre-crippled 3080 is now going to be worth even more on the secondary market?
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- mjlee 5y agoI'm not sure this really is all that good for gamers. It'll solve the short term problem of lack of supply, sure, but in a years time we'll instead have a whole bunch of e-waste mining cards and a very thin second-hand market for gaming cards. All upside for Nvidia though!
- NazakiAid 5y agoA major bad point with this is when the mining cards become obsolete, they won't be able to be used as a graphics card in a computer due to it not being able to output to a display. So realistically it will decrease avaliable graphic card supply to gamers in the future who are maybe looking for a cheap used graphics card (therefore pushing people to buy a new card instead). Short term fix, long term problem. I was thinking they could maybe get a second use in industry however they mostly buy new cards (from my limited knowledge on it). Nvidia knows the strats to make $$$ in the long term under the guise of the good guy.
- justaguy88 5y agoGraphics cards without display outputs are still useful, you can use them for VFIO and gpgpu workloads
- gruez 5y agoWhat's the market for second hand GPUs for scientific computing, compared to second hand GPUs for gaming?
- paulmd 5y agolike anything else, worth quite a bit to the right customer, until they become functionally obsolete (f.ex: nobody really cares about Kepler hardware anymore and it's gotten quite cheap) https://www.ebay.com/sch/i.html?_from=R40&_trksid=p2380057.m570.l1313&_nkw=tesla+P40&_sacat=0 https://www.ebay.com/sch/i.html?_from=R40&_trksid=p2380057.m... now, being that mining cards didn't start at $10k per card to begin with, they won't sell at $10k per card on the secondhand market, but they'll do OK. at a hundred bucks, why wouldn't you pick one up for your folding@home rig, vs paying full freight for a card with a graphics output you'll never use?
- kevingadd 5y agoNV sells tons of cards used for things other than mining and video output already. The mining cards can be repurposed for those use cases (compute, machine learning, etc)
- moogly 5y agoWhy only reduce them to half the performance? How about 0%. I predict this will do absolutely nothing for general availability of these cards.
- kevingadd 5y agoDenting the performance that way makes them no longer cost effective for eth, but doesn't make them completely useless for any workloads (in games, or adobe premiere, etc) that happen to look like crypto mining - so they can avoid selling a completely broken card.
- kevincox 5y agoBecause halving the performance makes them unprofitable to run. If you buy one you can still try mining, and if it falsely detects mining your desktop won't crash, but professional miners won't be interested.
- moogly 5y agoConsidering they sell the cards afterwards, I remain unconvinced that they will (to miners appear to) be unprofitable at half the hashing performance. I fear these guys will just want the double amount of cards now :/ So sorry, but I'll believe it when I see it.
- Havoc 5y ago> company's dedicated GPU for professional mining What a world. What do you do for a living? Professional miner. oh no not that kind of miner. Anyway...I'm guessing it's again only the eth hashing algo that's crippled.
- burnethtards 5y agoYou can customize mining algorithms to work on any hardware.... Either way gpu mining was always a terrible idea since they have resale value and thus cost of attack was small vs ASICs that are rendered worthless when they attack their own chain effectively unable to break even on sunk costs.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- nyjah 5y agoI have a dumb theoretical question, but I genuinely don't understand the answer. Why wouldn't nvidia and amd or any other card maker just keep the cards and mine all the cryptocurrency for themselves?
- warent 5y agoProbably because it's just not their business. They don't need to confuse their objectives with bitcoin to get rich, they're doing exceptionally well without it
- amelius 5y agoThen why is Elon Musk trading Bitcoins? Tesla makes more money trading Bitcoin than selling cars. https://www.wsj.com/articles/tesla-makes-more-money-trading-bitcoin-than-selling-cars-11619517615 https://www.wsj.com/articles/tesla-makes-more-money-trading-...
- rvanlaar 5y agoTesla stopped accepting bitcoin. https://abcnews.go.com/Technology/wireStory/tesla-stop-accepting-bitcoin-car-payments-77656963 https://abcnews.go.com/Technology/wireStory/tesla-stop-accep...
- amelius 5y agoThis was about trading Bitcoin, not accepting it as a payment method. Plus, it doesn't really change the question.
- Daishiman 5y agoBecause Tesla's most valuable product aside from the cars is the memes. I am not kidding. It seems a substantial proportion of TSLA buyers aren't really interested in its fundamentals but like what Elon tweets out.
- 5y ago
- whoomp12342 5y agojokes on them. Next crypto currency will be mined as a roblox mod.
- lvl100 5y agoToo little too late? I think mining has peaked with ETH POS shift weeks away. We will soon find out how much of Nvidia’s business was truly driven by crypto versus what they conveyed to investors in the past.
- ahD5zae7 5y agoActually, is there a need to block anything? They're coming up with a mining-focused product line now. Just make them slightly cheaper per hash and voila - all miners will be buying the mining-focused products. They lack the video outputs so it makes sense, you can skip some of the BOM on the card, save a few bucks. As it has already been mentioned in the thread miners are super sensitive to squeezing every cent out of their setup. If they can save some bucks on cards, they will surely go for it. So either the mining cards will be cheaper than regular, which makes this block a moot point in near future, or they will be more expensive per hash than normal graphic cards. In which case the block makes sense but in my opinion is a bad move by Nvidia. Making the mining cards more expensive than regular cards is throwing a gauntlet to the whole world to break the drivers or workaround the hardware. It will be fascinating to watch the cat-and-mouse game of hackers and Nvidia developers, but it will not fix the horrible GPU market situation we're in now and that is a shame. Disclaimer: I want to buy a new GPU soon but for the MSRP and not the price equivalent of a small car. So I may be biased...
- mrgordon 5y agoThe issue is the resale value for actual working GPUs is higher so the miners will often buy the normal cards anyway
- banana_giraffe 5y agoMy understanding is there is a concern that cryptocurrency miners are buying GPUs, using them for a few weeks to determine which ones they can overclock, and selling the ones they can't (and have probably limited the life of in the process) since you can probably sell a 30 series GPU for more than you got it for, even if you're upfront about it being used. All of that isn't possible with the mining-focused line, so Nvidia feels they need other tools to help convince the cryptocurrency miners to move over, hence the block.
- xur17 5y agoI hadn't heard of this before - do you have a link or something with more details?
- 5y ago
- superbaconman 5y agoI'm on the fence about switching from console to pc, but I've still been trying to get a 3000 series card anyway. The ability to use the cards for ml and crypo in addition to gaming is appealing, but moves like this just make me think sticking to xbox and my gtx560 is best.
- agloeregrets 5y ago> I've still been trying to get a 3000 series card anyway ...I think I know why you can't get one. In all seriousness though, using GPUs for mining has trashed the gaming market and made entire realms of PC gaming inaccessible to lower income people, it's an incredible shame.
- rsuttongee 5y agoI mean, the cards are selling at 3-4x MSRP right now. Won’t halving the hash rate just cause the price of the cards to drop to 1.5-2x MSRP and miners just buy twice as many? Possibly good for NVDIA I guess (selling twice the units assuming the can make enough), but I don’t see this helping gamers get cards in hands.
- Zandikar 5y agoNope. These are new SKUs (LHR variants), not a patch that retroactively applies to existing stock/sales. If anything, so long as crypto demand persists, this will result in a upward influence on the scalping price of the currently existing non-crippled 3070's and 3080's. Technically Nvidia has existing mining SKU's (their HX skus) so new supply is still entering the market, but its unclear exactly how things will balance out. In the short term (assuming demand remands high for crypto cards), I'd expect scalped pricing to go up, not down. And that's assuming these LHR's arent compromised like the original mining-crippled 3060's have been.
- sp332 5y agoI think it's less about the upfront cost and more about hashes per kilowatt-hour.
- rsuttongee 5y agoAh that makes sense, I forgot about power usage.
- m3kw9 5y agoWith Ethereum 2.0 there is no need for these cards. I think in a few months if it goes well.
- mrkramer 5y agoLike I said for electricity, aren't you free to do with your GPU whatever you want?! This is anti-consumer they should be sued. Just like ISPs wanted to slow your traffic for services they don't like and didn't succeed hardware producers can not limit what you do with your purchased hardware.
- Tepix 5y agoIt's not like nVidia is keeping it a secret. They are telling you ahead of the time that they are limiting the hashrate. If you don't like it, buy something else.
- mrkramer 5y agoIt's still anti-consumer, imagine situation in which self driving car manufacturer hardcodes rules according to which car not drive to certain places because reasons. Products even if specialized can always be used for general purpose that's the beauty of computers and "hacking" after all.
- Tepix 5y agoI think consumers that finally manage to buy a card at a decent price will disagree
- kaldorf 5y agoOther people doing research etc. need GPUs. If rich people started to hoard all food or ffp masks, shops would intervene first (they did during the hoarding last year) and the government would follow if that wouldn't help.
- mrkramer 5y agoI guess you are referring to the Tragedy of the Commons[0] but in the market efficient economy there should be enough producers(supply) to serve high aggregate demand. This action by NVIDIA only shows that GPU industry is highly concentrated and that more competition is needed. It seems like NVIDIA is a victim of its own success since it can not produce enough GPUs. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tragedy_of_the_commons https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tragedy_of_the_commons
- SXX 5y agoIt's will be funny to see how HN crowd that support Nvidia here will react when Nvidia going to cripple ML features for the sake of market segmentation.
- ollien 5y agoThis is exactly why I'm worried. I took an ML class last semester and having access to CUDA on my 1080Ti (explicitly purchased for gaming) was a boon for my project group, since we could actually tune models efficiently. This might be good for the short-term, but it sets a precedent I'm really not happy with. I know they already do some of this with Quadro, but my understanding there is that the value add is in its reliability and certification, not ability to operate on workloads that have been artificially crippled on the gaming cards.
- 0x_rs 5y agoThere's precedent with crippled FP16 performance, so it would not be surprising to see such things in the future to attain market segmentation from consumer cards.
- CivBase 5y ago> "To help get GeForce GPUs in the hands of gamers, we announced in February that all GeForce RTX 3060 graphics cards shipped with a reduced Ethereum hash rate," Wuebbling added. Is there any evidence that crypto mining plays a significant role in the ongoing hardware shortage? Any evidence at all? I see so many people complain about it, but I haven't seen any reason to believe crypto is one of the primary factors driving the shortage. I don't mine or trade crypto. I acknowledge the many problems with current crypto offerings and have no interest in dealing with the tech until those problems get sorted out (if that ever even happens). But I inherently don't like the idea of a hardware company intentionally crippling general computing tech like this. And it's especially frustrating to see them try to spin it as a positive move for their customers. The RX 6000 series was another huge step forward for AMD graphics hardware. Hopefully their 7000 series will be even more competitive. NVIDIA needs the pressure.
- mrkramer 5y ago"GeForce Is Made for Gaming" Yea just like Microsoft Windows is made only for Internet Explorer and Microsoft Office. Piss off.
- badkitty99 5y agoNvidia contributing directly to the energy waste
- Corazoor 5y agoI find the argument for this move unconvincing: Nvidias failure to meet demand is somehow the fault of... the customers? But since there are morally aprehensible workloads, it is totally fine to... throttle them? Not prevent or contractually prohibit, as one might expect... And of course it is Nvidia who decicdes on the morals of your workload. I mean, seriously, how can anyone be ok with that?
- wpietri 5y agoYou realize you're making a moral argument against moral arguments, right? If you'd like to know how people are ok with this, it's been explained plenty already, right here in this discussion.
- Frost1x 5y agoI think it's just an argument against a unilateral decision by NVIDIA under the facade of morals. Businesses aren't people and don't have morals, everything they do is strategic and profit motivated, even if the people that compose them have morals. My guess is that NVIDIA doesn't want one basket of demand dominating the majority of their demand while disenfranching all of their other demands in parallel computing (graphics, industrial/scientific, etc.). If they allow crypto to take the lionshare of their cards, consumers for the other demands will eventually seek out alternatives if they haven't already. That's all well and fine as long as crypto demand sustains whatever NVIDIA can supply indefinitely. It's not so great if crypto demand for GPUs drops drastically, then NVIDIA is sitting there looking to drum demand back up from all their previous customers and markets. Essentially, they're likely just trying to distribute risk for a future demand portfolio. I can't honestly believe any large investors or top level executives at NVIDIA are losing a second of sleep by having so much demand they have to turn people away. If they're losing any sleep it's all the lost profit they can't make because they can't meet full demand or because they're in a potentially risky situation.
- wpietri 5y agoDid they do it under a facade of morals? Perhaps you can point me to where Nvidia makes a moral argument. As an aside, businesses don't act on their own. People do have morals, and they're the ones running things. Whether or not they use their morals is a different question, but we needn't preemptively excuse them from doing so just because money is involved.
- throwaway879 5y agoUsing a made up but probably good enough analogy, if scientist created a blackhole in the lab that could end up sucking in the entire planet and the solar system, would it be OK for someone to jam the mechanism that sustains it? I think of PoW gambling casinos slash Ponzi schemes (Bitcoin) in the same way. If the governments don't have any motivation to stop the mayhem, then the company whose products are being used to create that blackhole should step in. I never liked Nvidia, but this is a necessary decision.
- bobviolier 5y agoNote that unfortunately they actually have a set of cards that are better suited for crypto.. they just don't want you to use these.
- webinvest 5y agoI can’t blame you for using a throwaway account for a comment like that. Many cryptocurrencies provide value while video games suck time and value.
- koluna 5y agoI’m sorry, spit my coffee over the keyboard. What value does cryptocurrency provide other than sucking the world’s electric energy for meaningless calculations?
- webinvest 5y agoI am glad you asked. The value that cryptocurrencies provide boils down to 3 main things: 1) A store of value. 2) A transfer of value. 3) A creation of value. Bitcoin provides a store of value by still letting you buy a pizza with your Bitcoin both now and in the future. It’s price has always been highly volatile but after every 4 year cycle, it has been worth more in every major world currency. Stellar Lumens, Algorand, Dogecoin, and to a lesser extent Bitcoin, & Ethereum provide a transfer of value by letting you send money across the globe. Ethereum is the poster child for a creation of value by allowing people to permanently deploy smart contracts to the Ethereum mining network. These contracts include ERC20 stablecoins like MakerDao’s Dai, USDC, lending platforms like AAVE and Compound, DeFi exchanges like Uniswap, Yield aggregators like Yearn.finance and Curve.fi, and DeFi coin converters like 1inch. Back in 2017, the only compelling Ethereum platform (or DAPP) was CryptoKitties which were the precursor to today’s NFTs. I think NFTs are in a bubble but nowadays there is a much more compelling and diverse lineup.
- jacquesm 5y agoNVidia has a supply problem. Imagine making something that is so popular that you continuously run out of stock for the people that you originally intended your product for. The normal solution would be to crank up production to the point where you can supply all of your customers. Might even get some better economies of scale out of it too. This is the dumb way to deal with the problem. Besides the fact that it will get hacked it alienates a good chunk of their customers who would be happy to drop more $ if there were more product.
- Const-me 5y agoI have mixed feelings about that. I’d like to replace 1080Ti with 3080, but miners priced me out. I wonder how exactly nVidia is doing that? I do little integer ops on my GPUs, but I do a lot of FP64 ones. Just like these integer Ethereum hashes, FP64 is not used by videogames much. If nVidia does that performance throttling by detecting some patterns in the code, looking for Ethereum miners, AV-style — pretty sure Ethereum miners will find a workaround soon. These AV-style code detectors are unreliable by design. If nVidia does that by crippling specific low-level instructions, this gonna slow down innovation rate for everyone. Not just for me with my niche FP64 CAD/CAE workloads, for games too.
- DrNuke 5y agoFolks, the GTX 1070s 8GB coming with 2017 laptops are still good enough for literally any semi-professional, non-mining application out there, from machine learning to gaming. With a few hacks and the right hardware setup, they can still do not-so-clever professionals happy. Therefore, this is a full supply-demand problem, with Nvidia facing its first, real catch-22 maturity problem: how do they sell new GPUs to happy-with-1070 regulars like me?
- icoder 5y agoIs there some merit in comparing this to regulating concert prices? There too one might argue to let the market determine the price, but there too that might lead to a very unequal situation for many, that may eventually backfire.
- hosh 5y agoIn other news, Nvida has cards specifically designed for professional miners: https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/cmp/ https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/cmp/ https://hothardware.com/news/msi-cmp-30hx-card-debuts-for-ethereum-mining-aficionados https://hothardware.com/news/msi-cmp-30hx-card-debuts-for-et...
- SV_BubbleTime 5y agoI know it’s “fact” but is there any actual proof that demand during/from Covid and new generation of hardware worthy of upgrading to isn’t the actual increased demand for GPUs rather than miners? I “know” miners are buying cards up and converting energy to heat while many would list climate change as important to them... but is there any proof it’s miners driving the demand?
- akelly 5y agoThis won't really do anything for availability or reducing scalper pricing. Miners are a sizeable proportion of sales but far from the majority. Gamers will be able to buy more of these GPUs but less of the non-LHR or AMD GPU's. GPU prices won't actually change. The real reason Nvidia is doing this is that when mining profitability inevitably drops, either because of a crypto price crash or Ethereum moving to Proof of Stake, the miners will flood the used market and ruin Nvidia's profits for a few quarters. Nvidia is trying to get miners to buy mining-only cards, because those can't be sold to gamers down the line. They'd rather mining cards become e-waste in a few years than get resold. People think Nvidia is doing this to try to help them get better prices now, but really Nvidia is trying to extract more money from gamers in the long term.
- JumpCrisscross 5y ago> Nvidia is trying to get miners to buy mining-only cards I thought the non-LHR cards are fully featured?
- riknos314 5y agoThey have a SKU specifically targeting miners https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/cmp/ https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/cmp/
- mikepurvis 5y agoThere is some precedent for hacking ex-miner cards to route the video signal back to a motherboard output over the PCI bus: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TY4s35uULg4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TY4s35uULg4 With so many more of them out there, it'll be interesting to see if this becomes more of a thing. Alternatively, it's easy to imagine that depending on just how constrained these are, they might eventually find homes doing non-crypto headless DC workloads, such as deep learning stuff.
- akelly 5y agoThey're not producing fully featured cards anymore. They're separating the market into RTX-LHR for gamers and CMP for miners.
- freeflight 5y agoThis whole situation makes me wonder if the GPU market will just crash once the biggest coins move away from PoW? The market would be flooded with a ton of current and last gen GPUs with second-hand pricing, while AMDs and Nvidias newest offerings suddenly lost a major part of their demand. I guess another possibility is that miners will just transfer their efforts to coins still working on PoW, trying to make those relevant instead.
- cdnsteve 5y agoThis is like buying a 400hp engine in a sports car but it's only available to use 400hp to those that are retired, and anyone else it's just too bad. The problem is not miners, it has been said many times before. The problem is the silicon shortage, and now scalpers and even worse yet, bots. Nvidia needs to work in fixing the JIT manufacturing process, spending resources on any other issue is not helping. Inventing new nerfed chips in your products to a specific use case is not solving this. They are at risk at also angering a prominent portion of customers since their "alternative" CMP HX line is laughable.
- wpdev_63 5y agoI said it before and I'll say it again - the vendors are the criminals here. There are vital industries that need GPUs for their viability - video games, medical research, engineering etc. and they should filter out the robo buyers to allow these people to purchase the graphic cards at reasonable rates. Right not RX570s are going for $200 on ebay right now... A 4 year old mid-tier graphics card.... Just allocating some GPUs to a wait list would be enough. For people like me who cannot wait for GPU to become available you can get a very cheap usb-hdmi dongle off of amazon for dual monitor support. It works well enough for what I need it to do.
- brianobush 5y agoThey are limiting mining of a single coin: Ethereum. Nothing is going to stop mining other coins, which are quite profitable. Also, Ethereum is going through two upcoming events which will change the landscape dramatically. July has EIP-1559 which will reduce ETH mining earnings by 30% and the eventual move to proof of stake in late 2021/early 2022. Both of these events will make other non-ETH coins more profitable.
- Tepix 5y agoEthereum mining is far more profitable than any other coin at the moment.
- cletus 5y agoI hope this is more successful than the last attempt (3060 Ti) where the "crippling" was just software and it was quickly circumvented, partly through NVidia's own screw up (they released a beta driver that didn't have that limitation). It's almost impossible to buy a GPU now. Anywhere you can occasionally buy them is heavily botted. Some sellers try and mitigate this eg Zotac has a queue system of questionable effect. Others do absolutely nothing (eg Amazon). You might say that's just supply and demand but it's not in NVidia's long term interest for crypto-miners to buy every GPU. Why? It kills the market for ML and gaming. What happens is as soon as the crypto market next crashes, those GPUs get offloaded and flood the market. I absolutely support NVidia in this, for several reasons. First, I'd actually like to buy a GPU for personal use. Second, there are real ethical questions around crypto, especially PoW. That will offend some people but it's true. Apologists will point to most crypto-mining using renewable energy. Yes, because hydro is the cheapest power. But all the hydro power use can actually limit the power and/or make it more expensive for everyone else. Wouldn't it be funny if crypto-mining is the solution to the Fermi Paradox where civilizations ultimately ended up cooking themselves in crypto-mining waste heat?
- didericis 5y ago> Apologists will point to most crypto-mining using renewable energy. Yes, because hydro is the cheapest power. But all the hydro power use can actually limit the power and/or make it more expensive for everyone else. As an admitted apologist, that's one of the weaker arguments. The most compelling to me is that power usage isn't properly compared to traditional banking. Sustaining all of the people and in person infrastructure required for traditional financial transactions requires more than just calculating the cost of transmitting the transaction. In fact those parts are comparatively cheap, it's the verification that's expensive, in both systems. All of the people employed in banks who play any kind of role have an enormous amount of cost associated with their employment. I'd like to see a comparison of heating and cooling costs for all of the banks in the world, which is just a small slice of the total cost of traditional banking, factored in to comparisons. The only one I've seen compared it to the computing cost for processing VISA transactions, which didn't seem like a proper comparison. I'm also generally suspicious of some people (not everyone) who's gut instinct to environmental impact are limiting the spread of innovative and extremely useful ideas rather than looking at how to decrease the impact, particularly when those ideas help to decrease reliance on powerful central authorities. Proof of work is the innovation that allowed cryptocurrencies to scale to the level they are today, and it's precisely that work that allows them to operate securely despite being decentralized. Abandoning it because of the impact rather than reducing the impact would be like abandoning cars rather than making them electric and more efficient.
- goodlinks 5y agoI mine with my gpu when i dont use it for other things.. i am still using the heat it geterates, it genuinely allows me to have the central heating off for more months of the year and on for fewer hours when i do use it. I considerd selling my 3080 as i struggled to justify keeping it given the price they go for on ebay, but in the end kept it due to concerns over the chip shortage.. Gamers are miners are scalpers.. im not a fan of companies dictating what i do with things i bought from them.. Level1techs did a video on using tesla gpus for graphics, so all of this seems like bullying really to me as a consumer.. if nvidia want to help make that easier!
- goodlinks 5y agoI wonder what the carbon footprint of a new gpu is.. it would be great to see all the old mining and ai cards being used to game on. I bet they can all do a decent 1080p game no?
- jaimex2 5y agoThis is done at driver level though right? So it'll be worked around.
- cableshaft 5y agoThanks Nvidia. Not even 6 hours and already all the RTX 3070 computers (of which I was planning to buy one this week) are already sold out just about everywhere, as people are panic buying computers with these cards. Probably going to have to wait months before I have a chance at one of these as a gaming PC again.
- cableshaft 5y ago...ended up spending as much on a computer as I would have yesterday with an RTX2070 Super instead, still really good but not quite as good. Don't really want to risk the situation getting even worse yet again, and even these computers going out of stock.
- Tepix 5y agoThis was announced several weeks ago already.
- daguava 5y agoI know this is just one usage of this, but hampering the workload of the hardware you're selling people is absolutely backwards.
- imiric 5y agoI don't get it. Are GPUs still profitable for mining anything? Hasn't the industry shifted to ASICs for many years now? I doubt any serious miners are buying up all the GPU stock. The shortage looks more like an effect of rampant scalping which we see with other electronics as well (PS5), and the general chip shortage impacting the supply chain. A cynic might think they're selling off low quality components with a marketing spin that they're actually helping consumers. With the current insane market prices, any attempt to meet the demand sounds like a great profit opportunity. A cynic might think that, but not me. :) Just take my money, Nvidia.
- 1ark 5y ago$10-15 per day, per card mining Ethereum. There are other chains ofc.
- optimuspaul 5y agoI am doubtful this will have any real affect of prices but I am hopeful. I need GPUs for deep learning and simply cannot afford the current prices if I can even find them available. I am so sick of cryptocurrency.
- cush 5y agoGood. Waste of energy.
- joshspankit 5y agoThis is dumb. As if literally armies of highly skilled technical miners aren’t going to quickly bypass whatever Nvidia has cooked up. They mess with the drivers? almost instant workaround. They mess with the hardware? That army will go through the GPU instructions one at a time until they find a way to change the mining software.
- kingofclams 5y agoWill this have an effect on compute outside of cryptocurrency?
- brettermeier 5y agoKill all miners, save the planet!
- quanto 5y agoHow does Nvidia limit the Etherium hashrate while keeping other functions (gaming, general computing) intact? Is the limitation implemented purely on the driver level? If so, how would the driver know which function it is computing?
- max_ 5y ago>NVIDIA announced today that it's halving the hash rate for Etehereum cryptocurrency mining on the new GeForce RTX 3080, 3070, and 3060 Ti graphics cards to make them less desirable for miners. I have a question for someone familiar with GPU technicalities. Won't this affect other, non-mining tasks? Crypto mining is based on cryptographic hashing algorithms. So won't this affect people in security? That work with hashing algorthims? I suspect tools like hashcat[0] may be affected. [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hashcat https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hashcat
- HelloNurse 5y agoGPUs will cost less only when cryptocurrencies are outlawed or otherwise crash.
- nroets 5y agoCould there be a valid reason for this ? For example: A trend may be appearing where hackers gain control of the GPUs of unsuspecting users and then mine crypto in the background. The GPU uses more power and slows down given the user a bad experience. Nvidia wants to decrease the value of such hacks and decided to cripple the hardware. Similarly reducing the incentive for employees to mine with company equipment and electricity.
- bufferoverflow 5y agoThis will achieve nothing, just don't update the drivers.
- simonebrunozzi 5y agoAny antitrust should look at this and immediately open a process to fine Nvidia for market dominance, or split it, or whatever. The ability for a company to do such a thing is in itself enough to grant such an action.
- Arbalest 5y agoCan mining cards be used for something other than crypto mining? eg rendering? Could they still be used in VMs and then route virtual display outputs via network?
- Giorgi 5y agoAre they seriously killing their own demand? This is weird
- DigitallyFidget 5y agoIt's likely that this is just a firmware change to the cards and nothing onboard/physically changed at all. If this is the case, then this is hilariously easily defeated by using the firmware updating tool, provided by Nvidia, to get around this. We'll see though. With any luck, they did make physical changes to prevent firmware flashing around this, but I strongly doubt it.