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Does 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

• creato 5y ago
  It 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 ago
    How is someone mining on GPUs they bought themselves infringing on your freedom, pray tell?
    • belltaco 5y ago
      The 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 ago
        What 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.
        • shagie 5y ago
          > What if you're only mining with renewables? The issue isn't the "we're using renewable energy - see, this doesn't make things worse." It also doesn't make things better. Whats more, its increasing the consumption of energy which is at the core of the problem. It would have been even better to push that renewable energy out onto the grid (and also not increase the consumption of power for crypto mining). Switching all new power consumption to renewable doesn't improve things because the baseline of non-renewable is still there. We need to reduce existing and switch existing to renewable. I suspect a bit of Parkinson's law is in place with energy. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parkinson%27s_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parkinson%27s_law -- The key is to stop making it worse (by mining crypto and trying to justify it with "but its from renewable").
          • drexlspivey 5y ago
            > increasing the consumption of energy which is at the core of the problem. How is consuming energy a problem? There is a blob of infinite energy on the sky and practically all of it is wasted.
            • esyir 5y ago
              Oversimplifications like this are a fantastic way to avoid the core issues. Harvesting said ball of energy isn't free. Solar tech and near future power infra is certainly not at the maturity level for this, especially when the consumer is a power and semiconductor black hole of demand.
          • onethought 5y ago
            I mine on renewables and with 3000 series gpus. I didn’t want to do any of this, I ended up here because my energy retailer decided to tax me for exporting too much energy to the grid. So short of earthing the electricity, my solution was to burn it up in mining, and improve my solar roi. The 3000 series gpus are the most efficient hashes/watt. So actually by disabling this, you are driving people towards less efficient/worse for the environment ASICS machines. Yes I batteried my home, and use my solar on everything I can first... there is still excess... especially at peak. Pretty sure this dismantled most of your argument.
      • arthurcolle 5y ago
        So earning income is less important than letting people play video games? Let's just say I'm unconvinced by this argument.
        • munk-a 5y ago
          I think it's quite fair to say earning income is less important than allowing people to achieve happiness and video games are a pretty well known way to accomplish that.
          • arthurcolle 5y ago
            I unequivocally disagree with this statement - "happiness" achieved by video games is superficial, without real meaning. They are thrilling endeavors and fill time effectively, but they are absolutely secondary to the absolute positive of actually deriving income. I seriously can't believe that anyone would seriously argue a distraction is worth more than actual income.
            • TheRealSteel 5y ago
              What does mining crytprocurrency have to do with earning income? The two are completely mutually exclusive, in fact mining is a great example of making money without doing any useful work
              • arthurcolle 5y ago
                Securing the network is useful work.
        • PragmaticPulp 5y ago
          I don't know any gamers who can game 24/7, 7 days a week with multiple GPUs. Mining and gaming aren't even close to comparable in power usage.
        • knorker 5y ago
          Would you say the same if you could mine bitcoin by buying up as much medicine as you could, and burning it? Because if you think the above behavior isn't "earning income" clearly better than "play video games", then your argument falls completely flat.
      • ReptileMan 5y ago
        The moment Trump and Covid just don't deliver the current ROI of clicks for the media, suddenly we started hearing about how terrible crypto electricity usage is. The same way plastics are suffocating the fishes got forgotten the moment everyone started to litter the world with masks and packaging from food delivery. It is manufactured news story the same way that next one will be.
      • judge2020 5y ago
        > The ETH PoS switch can't come soon enough. Profitability doesn't go down considerably with other cryptos that are efficient on 30 series cards: https://whattomine.com/coins?aq_380=0&aq_fury=0&aq_470=0&aq_480=3&a_480=true&aq_570=0&aq_580=0&aq_vega56=0&aq_vega64=0&aq_5600xt=0&aq_5700=0&aq_5700xt=0&aq_vii=0&aq_67xt=0&aq_68=0&aq_68xt=0&aq_1050Ti=0&aq_10606=0&aq_1070=0&aq_1070Ti=0&aq_1080=0&aq_1080Ti=0&aq_1660=0&aq_1660Ti=0&aq_166s=0&aq_2060=0&aq_2070=0&aq_2080=0&aq_2080Ti=0&aq_3060=0&aq_3060Ti=0&aq_3070=1&aq_3080=0&aq_3090=0&eth=true&factor%5Beth_hr%5D=90.0&factor%5Beth_p%5D=420.0&e4g=true&factor%5Be4g_hr%5D=90.0&factor%5Be4g_p%5D=420.0&zh=true&factor%5Bzh_hr%5D=63.0&factor%5Bzh_p%5D=360.0&cnh=true&factor%5Bcnh_hr%5D=2880.0&factor%5Bcnh_p%5D=330.0&cng=true&factor%5Bcng_hr%5D=2280.0&factor%5Bcng_p%5D=360.0&cnr=true&factor%5Bcnr_hr%5D=2490.0&factor%5Bcnr_p%5D=390.0&cnf=true&factor%5Bcnf_hr%5D=4950.0&factor%5Bcnf_p%5D=330.0&eqa=true&factor%5Beqa_hr%5D=285.0&factor%5Beqa_p%5D=360.0&cc=true&factor%5Bcc_hr%5D=7.8&factor%5Bcc_p%5D=390.0&cr29=true&factor%5Bcr29_hr%5D=7.2&factor%5Bcr29_p%5D=390.0&ct31=true&factor%5Bct31_hr%5D=1.8&factor%5Bct31_p%5D=360.0&ct32=true&factor%5Bct32_hr%5D=0.48&factor%5Bct32_p%5D=360.0&eqb=true&factor%5Beqb_hr%5D=46.5&factor%5Beqb_p%5D=420.0&rmx=true&factor%5Brmx_hr%5D=1410.0&factor%5Brmx_p%5D=270.0&ns=true&factor%5Bns_hr%5D=2460.0&factor%5Bns_p%5D=450.0&al=true&factor%5Bal_hr%5D=177.0&factor%5Bal_p%5D=390.0&ops=true&factor%5Bops_hr%5D=14.7&factor%5Bops_p%5D=360.0&eqz=true&factor%5Beqz_hr%5D=42.0&factor%5Beqz_p%5D=390.0&zlh=true&factor%5Bzlh_hr%5D=42.0&factor%5Bzlh_p%5D=360.0&kpw=true&factor%5Bkpw_hr%5D=39.0&factor%5Bkpw_p%5D=510.0&ppw=true&factor%5Bppw_hr%5D=28.2&factor%5Bppw_p%5D=420.0&x25x=true&factor%5Bx25x_hr%5D=2.49&factor%5Bx25x_p%5D=240.0&mtp=true&factor%5Bmtp_hr%5D=1.8&factor%5Bmtp_p%5D=390.0&vh=true&factor%5Bvh_hr%5D=1.32&factor%5Bvh_p%5D=360.0&factor%5Bcost%5D=0.1&sort=Profitability7&volume=0&revenue=7d&factor%5Bexchanges%5D%5B%5D=&factor%5Bexchanges%5D%5B%5D=binance&factor%5Bexchanges%5D%5B%5D=bitfinex&factor%5Bexchanges%5D%5B%5D=bitforex&factor%5Bexchanges%5D%5B%5D=bittrex&factor%5Bexchanges%5D%5B%5D=dove&factor%5Bexchanges%5D%5B%5D=exmo&factor%5Bexchanges%5D%5B%5D=gate&factor%5Bexchanges%5D%5B%5D=graviex&factor%5Bexchanges%5D%5B%5D=hitbtc&factor%5Bexchanges%5D%5B%5D=hotbit&factor%5Bexchanges%5D%5B%5D=ogre&factor%5Bexchanges%5D%5B%5D=poloniex&factor%5Bexchanges%5D%5B%5D=stex&dataset=&commit=Calculate https://whattomine.com/coins?aq_380=0&aq_fury=0&aq_470=0&aq_... (see the 'Rev. $ Profit' column)
    • munk-a 5y ago
      I suspect this definition issue is partially due to cultural issues - freedom means different things in different parts of the world. Outside of the US societal freedom and the freedom from pain are valued over the individualistic freedom valued in the US. I don't think either view is absolutely correct after having lived in a few different' societies - but there are valid points to support a view where individual freedom to act isn't the primary freedom to protect (i.e. protecting the freedom for everyone to live a healthy life better enables all individuals to achieve a greater degree of freedom as a society than being individually focused). I really think there's a philosophical disagreement on what freedom is at the core of a lot of the libertarian vs. socialist arguments.
    • TheRealSteel 5y ago
      I'm no longer free to live on a planet that has been destroyed by climate change. Crptocurrency mining uses more energy than Argentina.
      • MaPi_ 5y ago
        According to this[1] website, bitcoin mining is only around 0.6% of the worlds power consumption. It is certainly not anywhere near to being the main cause of global warming. [1]https://cbeci.org/cbeci/comparisons https://cbeci.org/cbeci/comparisons
  • henriquez 5y ago
    I’m not sure how crypto mining infringes on anyone’s freedom?
  • bl0b 5y ago
    Could you explain how you see crypto miners as infringing on other's freedoms? I certainly agree with your first sentence, and think NVIDIA crippling hash rates on their GPUs is the lesser of two evils - just because I think crypto miners are a) wasting massive amounts of electricity and b) messing up prices in the GPU market.
    • Valmar 5y ago
      Let's see... crypto-miners hoarding GPUs by the tens, hundreds, even, driving up GPU prices for the non-miner. Also, when the cycle busts, hoards of cheap, abused mining cards flood the second-hand market, making it difficult for companies to sell fresh cards, and also possibly hurting the company's reputation when an abused mined-on GPU fails prematurely. Miners can whine, all they want, but something needs to happen to hamper their greed for virtual money.
      • bl0b 5y ago
        Jeez I know all that and support this move by NVIDIA. Fuck the miners for all I care, I thought I said as much in my original post. I just don't think they're 'infringing on my freedoms' or whatever.
  • seneca 5y ago
    > Freedom is great when people aren't using their freedom to infringe on other people's freedom. Other people driving up the price on something you want is not "[infringing] on other people's freedom". It's an inconvenience, but you're still completely free to buy at the inflated price.
    • dorkwood 5y ago
      Could the price ever reach a point where you would say it infringes on the general public's freedom to purchase? Or are all prices simply greater and greater inconveniences?
      • Vrondi 5y ago
        No. There is no constitution of any nation which says you are owed the freedom to be guaranteed that a luxury good (like gaming graphics cards) will be available when you feel like buying it. Market scarcity of luxury goods has no infringement on anyone's freedom. Just like market availability of luxury cars or gold jewelry in no way infringes on anyone's freedom.
        • paulmd 5y ago
          the beauty is that there's no constitution of any nation that says miners are entitled to cheap gaming GPUs for their farms either. if NVIDIA wants to segment you out of the gaming market, that is their right as well. Free market cuts both ways - you are free to start up your own company and do it your way.
        • dorkwood 5y ago
          I see where our difference in opinion lies now. I don't put graphics cards into the same category as gold jewellery. There are entire industries of independent contractors who rely on GPUs to remain competitive, such as VFX and motion graphics artists. If GPUs suddenly cost $10,000 each, it means only a small percentage of the population can afford to break into those industries. That is, people who were once free to enter those industries no longer are. Isn't that an infringement on freedom?
• emsy 5y ago
  If we didn’t have such a dire chip shortage I would be upset on principle, but I see this as a move that’s supposed to help long time customers get a hand at a Graphics card at a reasonable price. Once mining will ebb off, those customers are unlikely to keep buying Nvidia products so it’s entirely understandable why they would do this. Also, it’s not like on iOS where the company whitelists apps, this is a very specific blacklisting.
  • capableweb 5y ago
    "If we didn’t have such a dire X I would be upset on principle, but I see this as a move that’s supposed to help ..." What worth is a principle if you don't still have it when it get challenged? Then it's just a opinion, which is fine by itself and it's ok to change opinion, smart people do it all the time. But don't call it a principle. Unlikely that mining will disappear because NVIDIA limits a specific algoritm/client software/however the limit is implemented. It will, like most "limit for your self-protection" systems, eventually be broken. Miners are already not afraid of picking apart the components they are using, so neither software nor hardware is safe.
    • void_mint 5y ago
      > What worth is a principle if you don't still have it when it get challenged? The realities of life make most principles less finite than one would hope. If Nvidia doesn't want to rebrand as a crypto-hardware company, they're going to take action so their products and brand match _their principles_.
    • tshaddox 5y ago
      > What worth is a principle if you don't still have it when it get challenged? Huh? To me, refusing to even acknowledge or entertain criticism for one’s principles is one of the worst things I can imagine. Principles ought to be routinely subjected to criticism, no different than scientific theories.
      • capableweb 5y ago
        > refusing to even acknowledge or entertain criticism I'm not advocating for you not listen to criticism aimed towards your principle. But if your principle gets put to the test and you abandon it, it's no longer something you fundamentally agree on, it was some "light belief" that you had.
• Uberphallus 5y ago
  Yes, it sucks, but the tragedy of the commons is real[0]. Not that I defend NVs solution, but I think the problem is worse overall. [0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tragedy_of_the_commons https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tragedy_of_the_commons
• Bancakes 5y ago
  Nvidia can't make nvidia laptops run well on Linux but they sure can cripple all their drivers, huh. That's what they're good at.
• X6S1x6Okd1st 5y ago
  Given that they are struggling to ramp up production to meet demand this seems like a perfectly acceptable move when they are essentially unable to serve their most loyal customers. The problem really is that cryptominers will happily scale their purchases arbitrarily high
• willis936 5y ago
  Indeed. I buy fast computers because they are fun toys. What if I want to play around with password cracking on my gaming machine? Is the hardware going to detect that I am running hash algorithms and throttle it? Is this a game reserved for state-level players behind closed doors?
  • PragmaticPulp 5y ago
    > What if I want to play around with password cracking on my gaming machine? Currently, you'd have to pay $2500 or more to buy a scalped card anyway unless you get really, really lucky with something like the Newegg Shuffle. If they break the mining incentive, they're going to drop the price of these cards and also make them more available. I'd rather have a hashrate limited card that I can actually buy at a reasonable price than a fully unlocked card that can't be obtained for anything less than 3X MSRP.
    • willis936 5y ago
      Well, the article does say that it will only be in a future revision of cards. I already bought a new 3070 from a friend for a mere 10% over the (already ludicrous) MSRP. What about when ETH moves to PoS or the crypto market crashes? The concern is that this feels more like a ratchet in a bad direction rather than a temporary fix.
• tshaddox 5y ago
  Don’t these hardware manufacturers already deliberately reduce the performance of some chips just so they can sell them for cheaper without actually developing and manufacturing an additional line of chips (i.e. price discrimination)? This doesn’t seem much different.
  • Siira 5y ago
    Price discrimination is evil. Perfect discrimination leads to products having zero economic worth to the consumer.
    • tshaddox 5y ago
      It’s easy to think of it that way. But here’s another way to think about it: a manufacturer has two assembly lines for two different products which are sold at two price points. As they scale up production, they realize that they could realize significant economies of scale if they combine their assembly lines and only produce the more expensive product, but then apply an “artificial” limitation to half of those products so they can still sell to both markets. Is it somehow wrong for them to offer the same two product lines to the same two markets, but just with a more efficient manufacturing process?
  • nickff 5y ago
    De-rated units are usually chips that didn't perform as well as they could have. A variety of manufacturing discrepancies (defects) can cause excess heat dissipation or non-functional cores. Selecting what a given unit should be rated to (clocked at or enabled to do) is often known as 'binning', and is common throughout the electronics industry.
    • paulmd 5y ago
      > De-rated units are usually chips that didn't perform as well as they could have "usually" is not correct here. They are sometimes chips that didn't perform as well, but usually they are actually higher-tier chips that are artificially locked down to perform at lower levels. AMD had over 80% of their Zen1 chips and over 70% of their Zen2 chiplets coming off the line with 8 fully functional cores. Yet they probably have 60% of their demand being 6-core or 12-core parts (2x 6-core chiplets). What do they do? Lock off 2 cores and sell 8-core parts as 6-core parts and 12-core parts. It is nice that they have something to do with the chips that actually are broken, but most of them are just gimped for price discrimination and market segmentation. https://wccftech.com/amd-zen-yields-80-all-8-cores-functional/ https://wccftech.com/amd-zen-yields-80-all-8-cores-functiona... https://www.guru3d.com/news-story/amd-zen-2-production-yields-for-ryzen-3000-dies-at-70-percent.html https://www.guru3d.com/news-story/amd-zen-2-production-yield... Same for the Phenom II X3 - almost all of those really had 4 functional cores and you could usually turn them back on. Why were they being sold as 3-cores? Price discrimination and market segmentation. Or for a more recent example - the rumors of an impending 3080 Ti launch in January turned out to be true! Someone got a picture of the actual chips, with a big line through the 3080 Ti part number, re-marked with the part number for a 3090. NVIDIA decided to cancel the 3080 Ti launch, and sell the parts as 3090 - and those parts were actually 3090 tier parts that were being marked down and sold as 3080 Tis. https://videocardz.com/newz/nvidia-quietly-remarking-geforce-rtx-3080-tis-ga102-250-gpus-to-ga102-300-for-rtx-3090 https://videocardz.com/newz/nvidia-quietly-remarking-geforce... It is a reality in this industry that you are constantly being sold artificially gimped parts, because price discrimination is the financially optimal strategy. It's better to charge a price-insensitive customer way more, and to still have high-volume parts for price-sensitive customers, than to have insufficient inventory to supply price-sensitive customers, or to price everything "fairly" and lose the price-sensitive customers due to prices being too high. But due to the way yields and binning work (you don't want to have high-volume SKUs that are difficult to produce - you want high yields even in your top SKUs) you have the most parts available in the bins that have the lowest volume, and the lowest amount of (broken) parts available in the lower bins that you sell the most of.
• cortesoft 5y ago
  You can still buy unlocked GPUs. What is wrong with creating a new product people want? I want a gaming GPU that is powerful and reasonably priced and actually available to be purchased. Unless Nvidia does this, how else can they provide that product for me?
  • nucleardog 5y ago
    And unless Nvidia does this, what does their market look like in 5 or 10 years? People won't wait around not upgrading their systems forever because the price of their cards has been bid up by crypto miners to unaffordable levels. At some point Nvidia simply won't have a consumer market anymore. They'll let go of a market-leading position in favour of the crypto miners. What are they going to do when the crypto mining goes away?
• void_mint 5y ago
  At some point, someone has to take action against harmful behavior, right? In the last few years, we've seen tons extremely problematic behavior arise out of well-principled technology (all of social media, cryptocurrency, etc). Groups of people say "When will we do something?!?!?!", and then, when something is done, other people say "But the principle of ___!". Sometime, someone has to do something about problematic behavior. The US government isn't going to do anything about it (as is evidenced by reality), but private companies are more than welcome to shape their products to match that company's intended vision for their product. Twitter didn't want fascist rants, Nvidia doesn't want all of their cards to be hoarded by crypto miners.
  • cma 5y ago
    Do you really believe Nvidia is being an enforcer here to "take action against harmful behavior"? It's just price discrimination. They saw they were leaving money on the table. Unless they thought it a huge PR win to do it, it's probably not much different in motivation than the previous thing with them segmenting out datacenter use.
    • behringer 5y ago
      As a gamer, I'd much rather they take miner's money for miner's uses and leave me able to play games in my spare time.
      • imbnwa 5y ago
        I can't believe this is so downvoted. So I, a gaming consumer, have to compete with bots every release because there's so much money in accommodating miner demand for the same cards? That's ridiculous
        • katbyte 5y ago
          It’s how I feel about getting a ps5, scalpers grab your all the inventory and I refuse to buy one from them so here I am just given up on a next gen consolfor the near future
• optymizer 5y ago
  I woke up early back on launch day in October 2020 to buy a 3080 when they said it would be available. Couldn't get one. Periodically I'd check newegg and other sites to see if the shortage is gone. Nope, on 05/18 it's still out of stock everywhere. Throwing $750 on a piece of hardware to play games shouldn't be this horrendous of an experience. I for one am glad nVidia is doing something about it.
  • Siira 5y ago
    They should just raise the prices. Supply and demand, you know?
    • PragmaticPulp 5y ago
      Prices have been raised. You can buy an RTX 3080 right now if you want. It's just going to cost you $2500 or so because vendors and scalpers are capturing that markup.
      • ajmurmann 5y ago
        Sounds like Nvidia hasn't actually raised the price. They could just auction this off from their website directly and cut out the middle man.
        • deleted 5y ago
          [deleted]
        • topspin 5y ago
          I don't know with certainty, but I believe NVidia has raised prices. I base this on the prices that appear on the sites of custom system vendors. Until recently you could get a complete machine from many builders with a GPU at something close to MSRP. Now you can't. These builders (the larger ones anyhow) don't buy from scalpers, so that means the device manufactures have raise their prices. Anyhow, that's my theory. Anyone have actual recent price lists for NVidia GPUs? Otherwise we're all just guessing.
        • 5y ago
• neither_color 5y ago
  While I wholeheartedly agree that nvidia should do this, what bothers me is that they take functionality away without adding anything in or lowering the price. They are selling a "technically" inferior SKU for the same price.
  • PragmaticPulp 5y ago
    > While I wholeheartedly agree that nvidia should do this, but bothers me is that they take functionality away without adding anything in or lowering the price. Vendors are selling cards at 10-50% above MSRP and scalpers are selling them at 200-300% of MSRP precisely because they're usable for mining. By breaking the mining incentive, they are dropping prices for consumers. Considerably.
  • CardenB 5y ago
    Due to supply constraints, retail does not represent the true price. 3080s are generally going for $3k on eBay right now. Their move is allowing the price of the card to LOWER back to retail price.
  • lacker 5y ago
    They aren't really "selling" the unlocked RTX 3080, though. They go for $2500 on ebay, and you're essentially winning a lottery if you manage to get one at the advertised $800 price. In practice acquiring a restricted RTX 3080 is going to be a lot cheaper than acquiring an unrestricted one.
  • exmicrosoldier 5y ago
    I work in SaaS. Availability is a key feature. A service with more features that I can't use is less valuable than one with less features that I can use whenever I want.
  • paulmd 5y ago
    > take functionality away without adding anything in coincidentally they just announced official support for GPU passthrough on consumer gaming cards, very likely as an olive branch to prosumers to calm the outrage over this issue.
• outworlder 5y ago
  > I am pretty sure my next GPU is going to be AMD due to this behavior by Nvidia. I was thinking about buying NVIDIA for the next GPU based on performance numbers alone. However, against it there's: 1) Terrible Linux support(and history). This is specially important now that most of Steam's library runs on Linux without issues. It was eye-opening to see Cyberpunk running almost perfectly on DAY ONE with the same performance as Windows. In the case of AMD, with open source drivers. 2)Control freak shenanigans (see also: this thread). This is doing nothing to address the GPU shortage. It's just dishonest market segmentation. 3)Their completely unacceptable behavior regarding reviews. They were punishing reviewers that didn't place enough emphasis in ray tracing. They would be blacklisted just by saying it's not important (which I happen to agree with). They handled the situation horribly.
  • endgame 5y ago
    4) Crippling the ability to GPU passthrough (subpoint of (2), I suppose)
    • TacticalCoder 5y ago
      All I can say is that that company well deserved Linus Torvald's famous middle finger: "NVidia has been the single worst company we've ever dealt with, so NVidia F--- YOU!" And they certainly haven't disappointed since back then. Petty.
    • navaati 5y ago
      To give them credit when it’s due, they recently lifted this limitation.
      • endgame 5y ago
        Too late for me. I bought an AMD GPU last year.
  • coolspot 5y ago
    1) I have NVidia RTX 2060 in my Linux laptop (Lenovo Legion) and NVidia RTX 3070 in my Linux Ryzen desktop. Previously had 1060 in Intel Linux desktop. Zero issues.
• slownews45 5y ago
  I'm thrilled by this. This has been a common approach in I think almost every industry. What nvidia is doing is recognizing that the needs of existing long time consumers / clients / partners are not being met by the current situation. Yes, it inflates short term profits and increases their pricing power, but long run if you can't buy nvidia for your dev box, your game box etc, this reduces the long run nvidia ecosystem. Crypto folks come and go. Serve them on a short term basis with something at a higher price point or make them lock in long term orders Almost every business works this way. Long time regular customer - you get pricing option A. Rando runs in with lots of cash? You don't let them destroy your long term customer relationships, but sell them some extra / high margin stuff if they are willing to pay enough. Intel just went through this ecosystem pain with ARM. They said no to doing iphone chip. Now an ecosystem has built up around ARM with far more investment than would have been there without apple leading the way.
  • akersten 5y ago
    If this works (spoiler: it won't, it will be cracked within a month), it will create more e-Waste as miners will toss their no-video-output-mining-only cards after they're no longer the latest tech, instead of being able to resell them to gamers, thinning the used graphics card market, forcing more gamers to buy new from nVidia instead of rebuying old cards online. That makes me angry, it should make you angry too.
    • luma 5y ago
      They are clearly marking the new models with a new suffix on the model number. As someone who has been trying for months to buy a 3080 and has zero interest in crypto, this is fantastic news... IFF it means I can actually purchase a card. This doesn't make me angry, and I don't think it should make you angry either.
      • akersten 5y ago
        The e-Waste part is what should collectively anger us, but I'm glad you're able to buy your card.
• behringer 5y ago
  Good luck getting a next gen AMD GPU for any reasonable price if NVidia successfully segments away the miners and AMD doesn't.
• Keyframe 5y ago
  I'd be worried a lot if it were for existing products, but this is a right move in my opinion. Drastic times, drastic measures.
• eugeniub 5y ago
  No I don't care.
• akersten 5y ago
  Yep, this enrages me. Deliberately introducing faults into a product to make it less appealing to one market segment in a desperate attempt to cover for their supply chain failure. Stinks to high heaven. In addition the detection is not magic (it can't be) so there are going to be false positives. Can't wait until my games start dropping frames 30 minutes in because the driver decided my competitive FPS was actually mining crypto. Imagine a headline like "Charmin introduces toilet paper that cannot be hoarded, to prevent shortages," and it's because the TP biodegrades after 6 months.
  • 542458 5y ago
    GPUs have been doing this forever. This is exactly the same as some features being enabled on quadros that don’t exist on RTX/GTX/GT cards. That’s (mostly) not silicon, that’s just firmware. This isn’t covering any supply chain failures (despite what nvidia says, the number of available GPUs remains approximately fixed), it’s just more market segmentation to minimize the secondhand mining GPU market and capture more dollars. I was also concerned about detection false positives, but as far as I can tell they’re detecting a very specific algorithm that only gets used for ETH mining - there have been no false positives that I can see. Some miners are even working around the limiter by introducing obfuscation operations, but that comes with a hashrate cost of course.
    • akersten 5y ago
      > GPUs have been doing this forever though. This is exactly the same as some features being enabled on quadros that don’t exist on RTX/GTX/GT cards. No, I think this is the first time a GPU has been heuristically trying to detect what you're doing and self-limiting in response. How is that equivalent to features just being literally off? There's no special "mine-crypto" instruction in the CUDA ISA. > there have been no false positives that I can see. How can you see that? These aren't released yet and the GTX-3060 isn't really a popular card among serious gamers that would notice.
      • 542458 5y ago
        The 3060 has been out for a few months now, and it has the limiter. Re: your edit about noticing, I strongly disagree. Tech reviewers would LOVE to run the “limiter cripples Blender/Tensorflow/whatever” story, but that hasn’t happened. And in this market users are generally taking what they can get, so I’ve seen lots of people who would normally run 70/80/90s running 60s instead.
• JamesSwift 5y ago
  I see no problem with it. I could see the argument that crypto is an existential threat to Nvidias business. If they lose a generation of PC gamers they risk that loss compounding years down the road as they and their children lean toward console. If they _want_ to serve those PC gamers first over crypto then they need to find ways to keep them as their customers.
• kemonocode 5y ago
  It angers me too, and most people are definitely getting upset with the wrong party- it is not to say crypto miners are magically devoid of guilt or that there aren't issues with scalpers, but these are all, deep down, supply issues that have sprung due to an over-reliance on Just-In-Time manufacturing. Pandemic-induced shortages merely compound what was already a problem.
• knorker 5y ago
  No matter if you think of what's happening here, NVidia is clearly not the bad guys in this story.
• _vertigo 5y ago
  It's honestly pretty surprising to me to see how many people on here are supporting this move. That's not what I would expect, I would expect people on HN to object to this move on principle. Maybe my prediction in where most HN commenters stand in principle on this issue is wrong, or just maybe, this is a rare example of a time when the principle (hardware should be free to run at their max capability, not deliberately hamstrung, etc. etc. - to me, this kind of ties in with the "software should be free" principle) conflicts with a more immediate desire to play the latest video games (lol). Harder to take the principled approach when you've been waiting "like 11 whole months for the 3080 I mean seriously dude".
  • pavel_lishin 5y ago
    I think it's hard to take the principled approach when you see that the result of sticking to principles results in large organizations enriching themselves while ignoring the myriad externalities. At least, it makes you re-evaluate your principles.
    • _vertigo 5y ago
      What, externalities like energy waste? If that's the case, why target ETH, isn't ETH going to Proof of Stake soon?[1] I admit I don't really know if what Nvidia is targeting applies to both pre-merge and post-merge ETH [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27194586 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27194586
      • formerly_proven 5y ago
        > isn't ETH going to Proof of Stake soon? Ethereum is going proof of stake soon for a few years now.
  • thereare5lights 5y ago
    > I would expect people on HN to object to this move on principle. I cannot think of any principle that would cause me to object to this. Blind fealty to general purpose computing here conflicts with the very real world impact on non-crypto consumers. If we're being utilitarian, it seems to me that it would be obvious that this is a good move.
• floil 5y ago
  It's not a whole new level. An aspect of Quadro differentiation has, since ages ago, been based on selectively disabling features that the consumer gpus silicon was capable of. It's the same strategy here. This makes sense to Nvidia because it creates a segment differentiation and will allow them to charge more for the higher hash rate parts.
• caconym_ 5y ago
  My next GPU is going to be one that a) supports the features I want, and b) that I can actually go out and buy without putting hundreds or thousands of dollars into some economic parasite’s pocket. It’s not just “hard” to buy high-end GPUs right now—it’s impossible unless you make a lifestyle out of chasing them down. If this has any effect on anybody who isn’t a crypto miner, it’s going to be to open up possibilities and/or save them money. I have trouble finding fault with that, and we’re surrounded by far more egregious erosions of our “right” to buy and use general-purpose computers.
  • kyboren 5y ago
    They are not economic parasites. They are the physical manifestation of the Invisible Hand. These are people doing God's work making an efficient market. If you don't want arbitrageurs to capture that value, maybe NVidia should start pricing their products correctly so that they capture the value. This isn't rocket science. > If this has any effect on anybody who isn’t a crypto miner, it’s going to be to open up possibilities and/or save them money. I have trouble finding fault with that, and we’re surrounded by far more egregious erosions of our “right” to buy and use general-purpose computers. This is a wildly short-sighted take. First they came for mobile users, and I did not speak out-- Because I like Daddy Cook telling me what math I can do. Then they came for the cryptocurrency miners, and I did not speak out-- Because I deserve a subsidy for my video gaming habit. Then they came for unlicensed cryptographers, and I did not speak out-- Because I have nothing to hide and if this has an effect on anybody besides them it's just going to be to make their skills more valuable. Then they came for the debuggers-- But I still didn't speak out, because we're already surrounded by egregious erosions of our right to buy and use general-purpose computers, so what's the point, amirite?
    • SrslyJosh 5y ago
      > Then they came for the cryptocurrency miners, and I did not speak out-- Because I deserve a subsidy for my video gaming habit. Are you suggesting that anyone who buys something and then doesn't use it to generate the maximum profit possible for themselves is being subsidized by someone else? That doesn't even remotely make sense. What's your stake in cryptocurrency?
• standardUser 5y ago
  I find the energy used in crypto mining to be a crime against humanity and support reasonable efforts to curtail it. Until we price in the externalities of using fossil fuel energy, no one should be wasting energy on this scale for such a spectacularly nonessential purpose.
  • sekai 5y ago
    Nonsense for you maybe, would you call flight travel, cruises crimes against humanity?
    • standardUser 5y ago
      Air travel and cruises provide unique and tangible benefits.
      • sekai 5y ago
        Same could be said for anything, it's all subjective
• m3kw9 5y ago
  Not at all, part of the reason is crypto miners buy up all the supplies and gamers can’t buy them. Then when crypto prices fall they dump old cards back onto the market. It hurts both sides
• undersuit 5y ago
  I felt similar anger for similar decisions. GPUs are complex pieces of hardware present in so much of our world but we are reliant on the manufacture to provide a driver to control the hardware. An open(source) driver is nice but doesn't allow you to do anything not documented, and open hardware is an nonstarter for capitalism with our weak IP laws(but hey let's protect a drawn mouse indefinitely.) Nvidia has done things like this before and it can get worse. Imagine a future GPU where only authorized drivers have access to certain features, and I'm not talking about the difference between consumer and workstation GPUs unlocking a few obscure openGL functions in the drivers.
• michaelmrose 5y ago
  What if they do it effectively and AMD GPU end up twice as expensive because gamers and miners have to compete for cards and the miners want 30 and you want 1.
• judge2020 5y ago
  > 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. The silicon might also be capable of running the latest nvidia self driving ML models, yet you don’t get that just because it’s capable- you have to pay them $x so that they have the money to pay their engineers to develop those features (and pay the company directors, and shareholders, etc). It’s the same for things like the professional quadro view software - https://www.nvidia.com/en-in/design-visualization/software/quadro-view/ https://www.nvidia.com/en-in/design-visualization/software/q... - there’s only a compelling business case to make this software as a result of the higher margins they make on quadro cards.
• Scarblac 5y ago
  In an abstract sense, yes. But crypto with proof of work is such a huge energy wasting uselessness that any action against them is welcome. Besides if they don't, then their old markets will disappear because they can't get cards anymore and start doing other things, and then when crypto is made illegal or crashes for good, they suddenly lose their whole market.
  • saurik 5y ago
    But this isn't an action "against" mining: this is just so they can use DRM techniques to build the computational equivalent of a network neutrality violation to price discriminate a high value use case to their CMP HX line.
• jp_sc 5y ago
  It does, but that the fact that the ponzy scheme that is cryptocurrency hasn't been made illegal by now should angers me even more.
  • Terr_ 5y ago
    That's inaccurate, a core feature of Ponzi schemes is that they require fraudulent activity, where someone is lying to participants about how much money is "theirs" and the way in which it grows. Cryptocurrencies don't do that, the system isn't lying to you about how many whatevercoins you own. Pyramid-scheme? Maybe. Pump-and-dump? Happens sometimes. Hugely speculative asset? Definitely.
    • deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
• godelski 5y ago
  > Does this behavior anger anyone else on a deep level? Yes. A lot of what has angered me about the situation is that there's these claims that these companies are going to help us as consumers but aren't actually doing anything that helps us. It is just show. They know it, we know it. So stop saying you're on our side and stabbing us in the back. As an example, look at NewEgg's product shuffle. It is a clear scam and actively helps miners. Microcenter, BestBuy, Amazon, and everyone else does the same thing but NE is the worst because the bundling with useless stuff. You want to help consumers? I have 2 models for you: 1) Create a signup list (like EVGA, but just select the number, not this list for every variant). Send out cards as they come in. 2) Only sell cards once or twice a month and in large pools (many cards in stock). This way you have a reasonable quantity of cards to hand out for the high demand instead of the small quantity that bots are always going to get to first. It should take only basic statistics to understand this. If a bot has an 80% chance of getting a product first and a consumer 20% then we need a bigger pool to draw from, not more pools (with small number of cards). More (small) pools helps the bots and harms the consumers. Larger and less frequent pools results in a larger set of consumers getting the products. With these two models you can better fight bots and stock doesn't need to be on the shelves for long periods of time.
• vikingerik 5y ago
  The situation fascinates me. It's one heck of an expression of capitalist market forces. Gamers can't get computational capacity for their graphics, because the market-clearing price for computing is the value of the cryptocurrency that that GPU could be mining instead. Every pixel you calculate has an opportunity cost of that calculation's worth in cryptocurrency. Nvidia wants to serve gamers over miners, presumably to establish and maintain brand loyalty for future purchases. If they can't increase supply, the only other way is to reduce miner demand. That's their goal; this limitation is just a technical detail of implementing that. Hardware segmenting to serve different markets has been a thing forever and I don't see any reason to call this out as any worse. That said, I like that Nvidia and AMD are taking different approaches here. That's free market capitalism, let the invisible hand guide the outcome.
• barrkel 5y ago
  It's market segmentation, and it's not a new strategy. The market is bimodal. There's the crypto miners and there's the gamers. Right now, gamers are getting starved out and middlemen are pocketing the surplus selling gaming cards to crypto miners. Nvidia want to capture more of that surplus for themselves, while also taking money from the gamers. Satisfy both markets with different products at different prices, prices that leave less money on the table.
  • the_cat_kittles 5y ago
    a succinct, correct explanation imo. if your angry, it should be at crypto before anything else. a largely useless tech that has lots of negative externalities, like this one.
  • ajmurmann 5y ago
    Given there is just more demand than supply. With this model they are still sitting customers who are willing to pay less for the same good. If there wasn't such a tight supply constraint right now, this strategy would make 100% sense to me. Right now they should just auction the cards off from their website. Keep all the margin and get the cards to the buyer for whom the goods are worth the most
• bb88 5y ago
  If I were a chip manufacturer like NVDA, I would pursue the crypto market with a special chips for each different crypto, to move the crypto market off their gamer line. Then let the crypto people pay 6x for 4x performance using half the power, e.g, meanwhile using that income to fund the research for the the 3nm, 2nm, 1nm production lines.
• NortySpock 5y ago
  It looks like this is tied to the hardware, so miners should look to avoid a particular manufacturing run of a SKU. Personally, I'm ok with this approach as it's tied to the hardware, and can be researched by everyone ahead of time to avoid "Model X, manufactured from Y to Z dates". Hopefully this can be determined from the SKU + serial number easily by a human reading the serial number. It's not a software driver change nerfing the card remotely, which I would be absolutely against. It appears it could be eventually reverse engineered and bypassed, which I'm also ok with. It's also not immediate e-waste as miners will avoid it anyway, and gamers can just use the card as normal regardless of the manufacturing run -- this isn't hardware that lacks video ports.
• wpietri 5y ago
  I'm all for it. My system with a 3080 had a hardware issue so I needed to swap it for a new one. It took me weeks of shenanigans with the vendor because they couldn't get a new card to send me a new system. And that was after a month's wait to get the original system, also due to supply constraints. I have actual work to do, and am fine with NVidia making it harder for make-money-fast potlatchers if that means I can actually buy their product to do useful work.
  • colordrops 5y ago
    I bought an MSI desktop with a 3080 specifically for gaming. I didn't even know you could mine ethereum with a 3080 until after buying it. I've been running a miner using power from my solar cells when I'm not gaming. I don't deserve to have my card crippled. Fuck NVidia. EDIT: Ok, I bothered to read the article. This is a hardware measure for new cards, not existing cards.
  • paulmd 5y ago
    AIB partners are selling a significant number of GPUs directly to miners, bypassing the distribution chain, without warranty, at about 30% higher prices than the distributors pay. So just FYI this largely comes down to your vendor making a decision that they'd rather sell a card to a miner than service your warranty request. They have cards, just not for you. https://videocardz.com/newz/chinese-gpu-miners-are-now-bulk-buying-geforce-rtx-30-laptops-to-mine-ethereum https://videocardz.com/newz/chinese-gpu-miners-are-now-bulk-... > We have heard many stories where miners in China are queuing up to NVIDIA board partner factories in hopes to buy graphics cards in bulk. Some AIBs agree to sell cards directly to them because those clients pay more (usually 1/3 more than any distributor) and they get limited or no warranty at all.
• babypuncher 5y ago
  You say that, but but you might change your tune if 4 months from now you can easily buy an Nvidia card because miners stopped buying them while AMD cards are still scarce.
  • paulmd 5y ago
    AMD is actually going into this full-throttle, they are not only starting production of mining cards on the same node as their gaming cards (unlike NVIDIA, where the mining cards are on a different older node that doesn't compete for wafer allocations), but they aren't even limiting mining performance on their gaming cards https://www.tomshardware.com/news/amd-rdna-mining-graphics-cards https://www.tomshardware.com/news/amd-rdna-mining-graphics-c.... So if they follow through on their "no mining limiters on gaming cards" you can expect miners are going to get both the gaming and the mining cards from AMD, and that the number of wafers going to gaming cards is going to shrink. (AMD cards already have the best value in terms of hashrate-per-dollar btw, 6700XT and 6800 are good mining cards, comparable to 3060 Ti mining performance for less money)
• bouncycastle 5y ago
  GPUs by definition are not general purpose computers. Remember the G in GPU stands for Graphics, not General.
  • 8note 5y ago
    Doesn't the G in GPU stand for Crypto now?
  • jagger27 5y ago
    That hasn't been true in a very long time. You can run arbitrary code on a GPU.
    • JimBeans2131 5y ago
      Yes you can run arbitrary code extremely inefficiently, which reinforces the point they are not general purpose by definition.
• ChicagoDave 5y ago
  They have separate product lines for mining. I don't understand the complaint. NVIDIA probably gets a ton of complaints about miners "stealing" all of the GPU cards. I think it's perfectly reasonable for them segregate the capabilities for their varying consumers.
• swiley 5y ago
  Meh. It's pretty consistent with Nvidia's behavior. If you don't like being Nvidia's bitch then buy AMD and use open source drivers. Sorry for the strong wording but if people didn't tolerate this crap from GPU vendors that would solve a lot of problems everyone has. You mention attacks on personal computing, the main reason everyone is stuck with vendor provided Android system software on their phones is because the closed GPU drivers are heavily coupled with it. Otherwise lots of people would have dumped it when they crippled the file API and started creating problems for termux. Because of this there's no real competition for iOS so Apple and Google can pretty much get away with whatever they want.
• hosh 5y ago
  I remember reading about this earlier in the year. What may not be apparent from this article is that Nvida is also selling GPU cards specifically designed for miners. https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/cmp/ https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/cmp/
• smoldesu 5y ago
  I dunno, the freedom fighter in me thinks this is a terrible idea, but my rationale says that it doesn't make much of a difference. Nvidia's hash rate limitation is really their way of telling miners that they aren't interested in their business. I suppose I could see Nvidia taking a hard left turn here and stopping acceleration for other things (like ML and physics calculations), but why would they? CudNN and PhysX are already such massive investments to them that throwing it out would break comparability with several games/apps and outrage the professional/consumer market. So given how few choices Nvidia has, I think I trust them to call this. At the very least, it should reduce their hardware demand to tolerable levels, so they can focus on securing better silicon rather than simply more.
• floatingatoll 5y ago
  Cryptomining angers me on a deep level far more than the nascent attempts of Nvidia to segment it. I think they're doing an incompetent job of diminishing the value of it, but at least they're making an effort to do so. Cryptominers are a far greater threat to general purpose computing than Nvidia. They ought to be compelled by law to purchase carbon credits for their mining, to offset the environmental destruction their petty "get rich quick" efforts have inflicted on the planet, enforced through Coinbase et al. and with noncompliant (offshore) exchange/wash platforms blocked and their users prosecuted through national laws and international agreements. Cryptominers and the malware they've created makes a very strong argument for walled gardens with enforcement and review of applications, simply because the vast majority of PC users are worse than useless at preventing misuse of general purpose Windows. I also think this proves Apple right on integrating the GPU on-die with the CPU, and not selling the CPU standalone at all, because Apple — unlike Nvidia and AMD — is having no such trouble with miners on their general computing platform. This issue is for whatever reason restricted to DIY PCs, and cryptomining will be the end of DIY PCs if this keeps up. (Perhaps you meant "DIY computing" rather than "general purpose computing"? I definitely see Nvidia's steps as interfering in the build-your-own computing market, but if it keeps the DIY computing market from dying off in favor of Apple, isn't that a desirable outcome?)
  • prestigeoctopus 5y ago
    If you use any of the services of Amazon, Netflix, Google or any of the other hundreds of services that are running off of data-centres then you are being a hypocrite. If you have a PC of any sort. You are being a hypocrite. If you use any modern technology at all you are being a hypocrite. The logic you operating under can be extended from crypto currency mining to any other generally in the IT space. Lunatics such as yourself anger me (I've looked through enough posts in your history to know that you believe that employment is "wage theft" and are likely to be some sort of quasi communist). Not only will you argue that things need to be restricted because you don't approve of an activity, but then you argue for government intervention (which won't have the intended result btw) which is both invasive, costly and draconian because you don't approve of how someone else is using their hardware which they have purchased legally. However when you approve of the activity/product there is no complaint. If you were consistent you would also call our any of the cloud computing platforms, the internet as a whole, social media or any HFC trading. Simply put you are speaking outside of both sides of your mouth. As an side. You will call for governments to incentivise/restrict usages of PC hardware and data, ignoring the fact that governments routinely get it wrong. Back in the mid-2000 Diesel cars were promoted all over Europe as "green" as they were more efficient than Petrol vehicles. Anyone that has ever owned a diesel will tell you this is a nonsense, you can literally see the soot on the rear of the vehicle build up over time from the exhaust. CO2 emissions would be lower (at the time Diesels had higher MPG than Petrol vehicles) but particulates are obviously higher. If you get what you want because restricting people's freedom is what people seem to want to demand these days and the majority of politicians are spineless.
• LeftTriangle 5y ago
  Yes. Everyone disagreeing with you is just making excuses for manufacturers to turn customers into serfs.
• wavefunction 5y ago
  I don't care. I have a 3080 I paid a pretty penny for so that I could play some games in high resolution and do personal machine learning projects. Between the cryto miners and scalpers I don't care what happens to those folks.
• vehementi 5y ago
  No. Only the miners. All for this.
• deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
• comboy 5y ago
  "This reduced hash rate only applies to newly manufactured cards with the LHR identifier and not to cards already purchased." I think you got that, but just to be super clear that is the case. No need to be angry as far as I understand that's how chips are made nowadays. You can have wildly different consumer offerings on the same die. You buy 3 inflated balloons, seller takes five of them and while you are watching pops 2. "Did you really have to do that"? In chip manufacturing this makes a lot of sense. Your anger is basically towards a manufacturing process and naming not the end product. And the process is just highly optimized while naming keeps thing pretty transparent - it wouldn't look good if they tried to sell it as a completely new card.
• SrslyJosh 5y ago
  > this seems like such an attack on general purpose computing. An attack on general purpose computing that only affects the people who've completely fucked up the GPU market in service of one narrow, non-graphics use case? Cool story, bro.
• SavantIdiot 5y ago
  > Does this behavior anger anyone else on a deep level? Since you're asking about feelings: Nope. I'm not a miner, and I believe the whole crypto thing is a pyramid scheme that is basically gambling in another form, so I'm not angered. In fact, I'm glad: I hope it keeps uninformed people from spending huge sums on bogus "get rich quick" schemes, just like the 2008 housing market was enabled by people who didn't understand balloon mortgages, and slimy lenders that exploited them. Now if I could only convince my friends that are losing their shirts in DOGE + Robinhood to cut their losses and put that money into actual investments.
• 8note 5y ago
  Is there any reason to sell GPUs for consumers to have in their computers anymore? The crypto folks seem more than happy to take all the GPUs at a premium, and consumers can use laptop integrated GPUs
• fomine3 5y ago
  I generally against to restrict what can be calculated, but now I have mixed feelings in this horrible market situation. I wish RTX 4000 series don't implement this restriction.
• deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
• racl101 5y ago
  Naw. They're trying to recognize the pain of their consumers. And trying to do something to address it. Better than nothing.
• bastawhiz 5y ago
  > Does 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. That's a weird hill to die on, since they're explicitly marketing and selling these cards with "LHR" branding and NOT discontinuing other non-LHR product lines. These are cards specifically for folks who don't use the features which are throttled. If they were doing this across the board, that's one thing. But they're not. If it means lower costs or increased availability for consumers who want them, that's a win. Moreover, they're not disabling anything, they're throttling. One or two GPUs are hardly going to mint you a fortune in ETH in the first place. The difference in hash rates is not affecting anyone who meaningfully cares about general purpose computing. Nobody is switching their industrial mining rig over to play Dota. They've throttled an extremely niche use case which makes the cards more broadly available to the public instead of a very specific single-purpose industry: that hardly seems like an attack on general purpose computing.
• timwaagh 5y ago
  Nvidia sells toys for gamers. Expensive toys, sure. But crypto is for people wanting to convert graphics cards into serious money. Nvidia would probably want to extract a majority of the profits of such customers if it can, because it's doing the majority of the work.
• totalZero 5y ago
  > Does this behavior anger anyone else on a deep level? Nah. I shed no tears for the miners. They're in it for profit and their profit is not my problem. Nothing about their business is "general purpose computing."
• linspace 5y ago
  I couldn't care less about crypto mining and I think, right now at least, it's doing more harm than good. But I'm against putting artificial restrictions on general computing, whether or not I agree on the application. So, yes, I think it actually should be illegal for NVidia to do this.