"the software drivers for this graphics card will automatically limit cryptocoin hashing rates to half"
How do they want to ensure that they're not cracking the drivers and/or writing they're own drivers. My understanding is that crypto mining has become so large that they have enough resources for this.
There are ways to do it that cannot be bypassed. All you have to do is look at non-k Intel processors. They stopped overclocking and to date there have been no workarounds.
But you are right in the fact that when a lot of money is at stake the resources are commensurately high. Eventually they'll realize they can just make their own dedicated hardware.
Seems like a lot of resources are being wasted simply to find target hashes.
Overclocking is trivially measurable at the hardware and firmware level. Detecting what a particular piece of software is trying to accomplish is an entirely different kind of problem.
You don't need to lock down that low of a level. It's easier to just make a hardware-software handshake that is difficult to crack. The N64 cartridge/coprocessor took nearly 2 decades to crack. I'm sure something even more advanced could be done with today's coprocessors.
I don't understand what you're trying to say. The difficult problem NVIDIA faces here is not in making a secure lock, but in figuring out when it's supposed to unlocked or locked.
For Intel CPUs, it's trivial to determine what is and isn't overclocking, and whether a given model is or is not supposed to permit overclocking. For NVIDIA, it is not simple to accurately determine whether a piece of software is a miner or some other GPGPU application. Their strategy of nerfing mining on consumer graphics cards will probably only work because GPGPU applications are still relatively few and far between, so there probably won't be too much fallout when NVIDIA's miner detector turns out to be overzealous.
NVIDIA is pretty much signing up to implement an antivirus engine in their GeForce drivers. That won't end well.
NVIDIA is currently only targeting ETH which is the highest value ASIC resistance crypto, so they only need to look for memory pattern ETH generated as part of their ASIC harden measures.
Cryptocurrency is also far less adaptable than viruses and are also highly visible. Every change in algorithm require a hard fork that split the coin into new and old which is a major disruption for the ecosystem. On the other hand, NVIDIA could just load updated vBIOS with each new batch of GPU they manufactured.
It's a temporary fix - undesirable but better than the alternative - to mitigate long-term damage to their core gaming business due to inability to supply cards to gamers. They can rescind the limitations after this market bubble bursts, and crypto mining takes a backseat again.
Miners won't have to deal with the 3060. They'll just snap up the rest of the 3000 series as soon as those are available like they've been doing. In the end, the only card available for gamers will be the 3060.
Hope this isn't true (and I'm a miner, not that kind of miner that bought consumer-grade GPUs), at least this CMP HX give some hope on both sides, just if they're cheaper and more powerful than consumer GPUs will maintain miners out and stock also prices going down
If you look at the figures given by Nvidia. Its the opposite. You will get worse chips that consume more energy. To resume, you will probably be getting those chips that failed the binning and are unsuitable for gaming
The funny bit here is that the 3060 is probably a better offer (relatively speaking) for miners than for gamers. It's looking to barely be any better than Turing's miserable RTX offerings at this price level.
Nah, gold WAS the real currency and that IS a scam. Gold has inheritly little/no value. It is not useful like copper. The properties of gold is that it is scarce, it is pretty, and (like religion) it is very very old culturally. Individuals, Tribes, Cities, and King/Kingdoms have gone to ancient-modern war over it. And so it is ESTABLISHED.
Cash does not have the same privleges. Yet, gold has actually been superceded by Fiat Currency (EUR, GBP, USD, JPY, CNH). Why do I say this? It is because these have the most trust, most accepted, and most used at the current time.
Sure, you can go to shops and buy goods and services with gold, but it isn't as easy. Cash is King. Right now, Bitcoin let alone other cryptocurrencies don't have this status. They're not old like gold, nor used like cash. They don't have a use. They're only used to MAKE money or STORE money. Few have niche uses but it has nothing to do with it's value. Just trying to clear up some misunderstandings and fallacies.
"Etherium is as much of a scam as FIAT currencies like the US dollar are." At least the US Dollar is backed by the "full faith and credit" of the United States. So unless the US government goes under, its not going anywhere and if that happened we would all be screwed anyway. Also, Dollars go through the banking system where there is regulation and oversight and the FDIC in case my bank did go under. \ Crypto currencies are backed by Vladimir Putin's Oligarch buddies (about 70%) along with their counterparts in China. So not only could the whole thing go belly up, but people who really don't like us could engineer it to happen. Ill keep my money in good old $$.
Well, nobody ever made big money overclocking before. And the number of people that really care is very small to matter, mining is a different beast right now.
The problem could be solved if both AMD & nVidia introduced full-power cards with their video outputs permanently disabled--via laser. They could create an entirely new market for themselves. I don't understand what this has not already happened, actually.
Maybe if they implemented a not-downgradable firmware to all newly made GPUs that forces the mining limitations.
But knowing Nvidia this whole effort will be just a patch. After all it's not as if Nvidia is losing money like when people use to mod Geforces into Quadros.
That seems like a more likely proposition. If that's the case, then at least they'd actually be adding to supply rather than simply splitting it up more.
those hash rates are pretty garbage for the TDP, worse than Pascal even! for example, my 1060 3GBs hashed 22MH/s at 75w (before the DAG file outgrew their memory) my 1080 is currently hashing 32.5MH/s at 110w my 2080ti is currently hashing 57MH/s at 150w
>For the TDP Precisely. These will be bought in bulk by mining companies and undervolted/have their memory tuned. That will help bring the efficiency to a better level.
The numbers used in the tables are already "tuned" and "undervolted". In fact, to achieve those hash rates at those performance levels might not even be realistic for some miners.
Nvidia could just forbid it's partners from selling directly to Miners in China (and not sell pallets over pallets of FE cards directly to miners themselves)
I doubt the hashrates are reasonably comparable between Minerstat and nvidia values, likewise the power. No serious miner would run at rated TBP and it will be far below that. I'd guess nvidia hashrates are what you get at "stock" and typical mining tuning will improve that a lot. For example, minerstat says a 1070 does 27MH/s. I have a FE going at 21MH/s. I'm not a serious miner. I just turned down power limit, but didn't overclock ram. That likely explains a large part of the gap, even without going as far as mining bios for optimised memory timings.
If it's not done via non-writable firmware it'll just get hacked around.
It's good PR, and scaring some miners off from release day purchases isn't nothing, but it's not going to do much in the medium term.
Etherium's plan to switch from proof of pollution to proof of plutocracy later this year might help. Assuming that miners don't successfully fork ether to keep doing their thing; and assuming there aren't enough other GPU minable coins to switch to.
There's a difference between trying to fork and doing so successfully. If fork-ether doesn't capture enough of the larger userbase and ends up only worth a few percent of standard-ether it won't be able to blow up the broader GPU market anymore. The two existing forks fall into the two small to matter bucket: etherium classic is worth less than 1% of normal etherium and ether-zero is more or less worth nothing at a current price of ~0.3 cents.
Your number for the Hash rate/Power are really off and only come close to that if they've been modified by the miners. Otherwise they're much close to nvidia's figures. The 3080 is a 320w chip and unmodified uses that or more for mining which is likely what nvidia is quoting for their 90HX. I'm sure some experienced miners will get that rate higher and drop the power target.
The only ones being saved by this move are nvidia themselves, at the cost of consumers never being able to take advantage of these when the bubble bursts and the RTX cards would be reintroduced to the market as 2nd-hand offerings.
Availability for PC gaming consumers isn't going to increase because production is just going to shift to these cards that are cheaper to make (i.e. higher margins for nvidia). And when mining ceases being profitable the miners can't sell these display-less cards back to gamers, who at that point have option other than buying whatever new GPUs nvidia has to sell them. Miners will obviously know this so they'll target the gaming cards first, and the mining cards second.
I can't use those either for my personal use as I'd mostly use them for rendering with gaming on the side. Hopefully the driver limitation doesn't chew in to CUDA workloads, although for me OpenCL is still an option.
So then buy a new one instead of a used one? Why should other people not have the option to buy used mining cards because you don't want one? The existence of second hand mining boards is not limiting your ability to buy new; in fact, it lowers the prices of new boards because Nvidia has a smaller number of potential buyers when some people are buying second hand. That's the entire reason they're doing this.
And what if I buy a ex-mininng video card and it doesn't work propperly, do I take the loss and move on to buying another one? How much would I have to pay for two used video cards as opposed to buying a new one (which comes with guarantee and even 1-2 video games)?
If they're taking advantage of chips that would have otherwise been broken / uneconomical for gaming purposes, then it may not be all that bad. If not, then yeah, this sucks.
As it is, though, there should still be a plentiful flood of gaming GPUs back into the market once this bubble bursts. Looks like I'll be waiting until then for my next build.
Utterly pointless, as a driver, this can be worked around in 2 seconds: load your mining software onto linux. Or just use an older driver. Or disable the check in the driver. There are so many ways around this it's pathetic.
Honestly the best thing to do is simply continue supplying GPUs. Money is money, after all, and eventually the market will either stabliize or crash. The demand is there, frankly the biggest limit is A) production, which is hampered by the pandemic, and B) retailers, which goes without saying.
They can easily roll out a driver update to existing cards that do the same thing, nvidia has for years made it clear that they can and will enforce certain security updates to users without them knowing, even via windows update if have to. Maybe not to linux? don't know how that works.
But they can force all current cards to half rates as well if they want too..i suspect they might already doing it.
You don't seem to have any idea what you are talking about.
Crippling existing cards will be an automatically class-action lawsuit. There's legal precedence with the Playstation .and Linux Support. Nvidia is free to release new cards that half mining performance, that is fine. That doesn't apply to existing products already purchased by their customers.
This is a bad way to fix the market. Limiting hash rate through driver should not be implemented until the new crypto cards are available on the market, as they will always find away around the limiting drivers. Nvidia is essentially disabling their products for certain usage.
For bitcoin like applications yes. But etherium was designed to prevent that sort of hyper-focused hashing; GPUlike compute cores and lots of GDDR is the most efficient way to mine it. At least one of the big BC mining companies designed an ether asic; but AFAIK never brought it to market because the upfront costs would exceed the marginal gains they could get vs just buying from AMD/NVidia. If future GPUs increase their share of RT cores, that calculus might change; OTOH etherium is planning to move away from compute based mining so... ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
(And going farther down the process behind etheriums design are coins like monero that are only CPU minable. IIRC they need a ton of ram/core.)
In short they take a LONG time, but the pallets and pallets of selling with the damn PSUs and farms it makes a huge thing. That's the key here.
And even hating the Cryptobs so hard but I do not like the approach Ngreedia is doing, nerfing the GPUs is not good in any way, today it's this tmrw it will be another segementation bullcrap.
Will caveat that I do own and use p106-100's (I picked them up during a low interest period from a mine that was shuttering a part of their gpu portion). Regardless any fab being used to produce a new crypto segment is not for the benefit of pc gamers, its simply another cash grab. If the HX cards aren't a good ROI miners will continue to buy the retail gpus & workstation cards because they can simply use firmware & drivers that mitigate what nVidia places in newer drivers. The lesson to learn in 2017 & 2018 was that gamers should be benefitting from unused clock cycles by conducting proof of work for a crypto network since it easily can pay for current/newer components. The lesson that needs to be learned from the current logistical predicament is not by miners (who are simply finding solutions that are available in a free market), nor gamers (who are never at fault in this conversation), but retail sellers who should have from the on-set treated this like toilet paper during the early pandemic (1-2 per customer & keep a rolling ledger of who has purchased), better api mitigations for auto-buying/bots, etc.
Indeed - hell, they could even have passed the extra admin costs onto the consumer (and then some). What's an extra $20 per card vs. several hundred in markup from a scalper. But it seems like most retailers preferred the easy route of shifting as much stock as possible as fast as possible.
Commendable but mixed feelings. The driver nerf is band-aid to the problem, it will come lose easily. Besides, the 3060 won't be Nvidia's best mining card though any decent gaming GPU right now is good for mining due to acute shortage. Can't say much about their dedicated crypto mining product until the price but surely is better solution than band-aid and would steal some market from dedicated ethash/eth mining products coming from China
"As for consumers looking to get a video card for gaming purposes, today’s announcement is probably a bit of a wash."
Are miners going to buy the cards with a lower hash rate at as high of a price just assuming that some time in the future they'll get the full hash rate? I don't think so. It will have at least some effect on the price of the cards at launch, and so it's not a wash for gamers, it's a win for gamers.
This is just Nvidia wanting to appear to be 'doing something'.
They know the drivers will be hacked. Selling borderline chips as mining-only cards makes them extra money while doing pretty much nothing for the gamer who wants a card. As the article mentioned, unless the mining-only cards are a hell of a lot cheaper than the retail cards miners will keep grabbing up retail units. They can just resell them when the mining market goes south or something faster comes along.
Miners don't resell cards so much. By the time they want to get rid of the old cards they are likely not worth very much because it's the miners who have pushed up the price of the cards to begin with. As for the newer cards, they'll just keep mining with them, also, because why would they sell low and buy high? They'll instead keep mining all the way down to the break even point waiting for the price of crypto to go up.
I don't understand these numbers. Even if you take a 3080, halve the hash rate, it still comes out ahead of the 50HX both in terms of hash rate and power consumption. Who would buy these cards?
It makes sense because they have probably built up a significant stock of Turing cards that couldn't make it as gaming cards but can be fashioned as miners, but they can't have very many Ampere cards like that as of yet.
as much as i have a love/hate relationship with crypto (paid my rent a few times), i wonder if this will have a negative impact on compute projects like BOINC ...such as previously SETI@Home, now MilkyWay@Home, Einstein@Home, Folding@Home, etc...
That was my first thought as soon as I saw it. I think GPU compute projects like F@H run CUDA on NVidia cards so maybe there's something that can be used to identify the job type in CUDA
Unlikely. I think it doesn't even negatively affect some other crypto algorithms. And the algorithmic checking is done in software, in the drivers. It's just that the drivers must undergo a handshake with the bios and the bios must undergo a handshake with the silicon. That means NVIDIA are completely free to adjust the mechanism on the fly with driver updates. As long as they don't come out with a valid driver version that is too loose, ie, that allows what it's supposed to limit, it should be OK. And it's easy to check that it's activating on the things that are supposed to activate it.
I think the biggest issue is whether someone can create an algorithm that mines efficiently but that doesn't trigger the limiting function, because I am skeptical that people will quickly find a way to get around the security features on the chip. I guess we'll have to wait and see. The thing is, even if they either make a non-limited algorithm or they find a way to put on their own bios eventually, if NVIDIA gets, say, 6 months of it working as intended that's probably enough to see them through the current crypto boom period, and certainly gives them time to catch up with gaming demand for the new architecture.
I guess you could say that. Except that's an ever-present situation. And it's also less clear how much the DRM is necessary. There was never a full disruption of game publishers' businesses. But in this case the disruption is both palpable and comes in sudden and unpredictable spikes.
So many of these tech bloggers, for lack of a better word, like Linus Tech Tips from what I'm told (I haven't watched their video), either don't understand business or are just interested in saying what they think will get them more popularity or attention. They don't seem to understand the serious disruption that a mining craze has on NVIDIA's business or why NVIDIA would genuinely want to combat that disruption. It makes perfect business sense that NVIDIA would want to segment gaming and mining demand and be able to not let mining demand disrupt their gaming business. Concluding before the products even hit the market that NVIDIA are just trying to pull the wool over people's eyes is unfathomable.
If this can be done at the driver level and Nvidia is serious about dealing with this then why just the 3060? Make the entire 30XX series do this. This sounds like a weak attempt at PR by them.
Firstly, it's not just at the driver level. The control is implemented at the driver level. It's entirely software, but the driver must be verified by the bios and the bios must be verified by the chip. Secondly, as JimmyZeng pointed out, if there's a valid driver available that already allows the feature then it's too late to stop. But thirdly, NVIDIA would open themselves up to lawsuits by limiting functionality after a purchase has been made.
I'm trying to understand the article but basic info is missing. What is Ethereum? What is MH/s that's referenced in the tables? You gave a figure of $15/day profit for a 3090 but shouldn't your number also include costs like electricity and depreciation on the hardware? It would be nice to give some numbers of what happens if the the price of bitcoins returns to normal levels (is that possible?). I thought these crypto currency algorithms were designed to avoid these spikes in prices by getting much harder to discover new "coins" - is that not true?
All good questions but this article is just an update on news affecting one part of the crypto mining industry. It’s not an explainer of the multiple basic concepts you’ve asked about. Google is your friend.
This is just Nvidia's way of ensuring that sales won't drop when Ethereum prices inevitably drop again. It has nothing to do with making more cards available to desktop users or making cards cheaper for miners, because Nvidia will just divert 100% of available silicon to mining boards for as long as they can sell them. Then when they can't shift mining cards anymore, there will suddenly be all the supply you could ever have dreamt of for desktop users; and conveniently for Nvidia, the desktop user will not be able to buy any of the second hand boards off of miners, so Nvidia gets another full price direct sale again. What a convenient coincidence.
Remember kids: reusing, repairing and recycling is very bad for profits, so we can't have that. Miners are stuck with their cards instead of being able to sell them and desktop users are stuck buying new at full price instead of buying used; the only one who wins here is Nvidia.
Not crying. Why? Just got off a discussion about this subject elsewhere and to sum some gamers feel that they have first mover privileges (since their purchases drove the development of GPUS) and hence they should be at the head of the line. That's over miners, and GPGPU users which isn't the squeaky wheel in this fight.
I see this as a pure manipulating PR stunt, they've said that they' put gamers 1st before, when they're selling Mining GPUs with DirectX disabled, have you ever seen a recent NV Gaming GPU with CUDA disabled? well miners might simply migrate to shaders anyway.
I bet the limiter will be cracked in a couple days.
Seems unlikely that it's just a "PR stunt". What sort of "PR" would it give them to have their system circumvented in a few days? "NVIDIA is incompetent." Not good PR. SO if they are implementing it they are confident that it will work for a sufficient amount of time to make a difference in the market. That means a few months, perhaps.
Not sure what your point is with a gaming GPU with CUDA being disabled. Of course they are not going to do that. CUDA is used extensively in CAD and render software. And when did they sell any GPU with DirectX disabled?
As far as using graphics mode for compute, NVIDIA has complete control over the ISA for their chips, and they don't publicly release it. NVIDIA is going to know how things will be executed in terms of instructions and how they can detect certain algorithms, and the people trying to make the algorithms work will mostly be trying to guess and check. If NVIDIA implements their check in an intelligent way it probably is not going to be an easy task for programmers to get around the limit in a reasonable period of time, ie, a couple of months. Eventually they might.
> What sort of "PR" would it give them to have their system circumvented in a few days? "NVIDIA puts gamers first", that's what they're trying to tell, if that's not clear.
> Of course they are not going to do that. CUDA is used extensively in CAD and render software That's not what gamers do, that part of the market was covered by Quadro, not GeForce.
> And when did they sell any GPU with DirectX disabled? Check P106(and P102/P104), 1st gen miner GPU that were sold discreetly, IIRC DirectX/OpenGL/Vulkan are all disabled, leaving only CUDA enabled, the limit is driver only, users could still use an old driver to circumvent that.
I don't think the limiter could be implemented in hardware, in driver more likely, which could be cracked, not easily hackable like open source software, but crackable, especially when it is hugely profitable.
"or simply silicon already manufactured that had defects in the video output pipeline." To me, that's the only way this makes any sense. Otherwise if they're just diverting GPU chips that could be in regular video cards to these dedicated cards without increasing the total amount of cards available. That said, I wonder if these mining cards could be used as a second (or third) card in an SLI setup... i.e. have some resell value once the miner is done with it.
So, Nvidia is releasing cards that are 'gamer-friendly' by crippling mining via a BIOS-Driver adjustment. AT THE SAME TIME(!!) they are releasing 'mining-friendly' cards suitable for...miners.
Hmm...anyone spot the rather obvious issue we have here...??? Nvidia are currently unable to prevent pallet-loads of cards (gaming/miner - it doesn't matter) going direct-to-miners. How on earth is splitting up production going to help? Miners CLEARLY have sickeningly easy access to Nvidia/AIB warehouse stocks. Let's now factor a couple of remaining issues: miners clearly have the resources to get those BIOS and Driver files disassembled and functionality decoupled from any anti-miner checks. Additionally, miners may well want some reassurance of being able to sell all those cards once the 'boom' is over - and they ain't gonna sell Nvidia's 'miner friendly' cards. Oh yes, do you see the issue with splitting production up?? - even LESS cards for gamers!
In the end Nvidia - YOU NEED TO STOP SELLING DIRECT TO MINERS AND GET ON TOP OF CORRUPT AIB's DOING THE SAME.
This "mining" of crypytocoins is among the worst things that happened to our modern civilization, comparable to the 20th century surge in drugs consumption.
This is a strange comparison. Cryptomining is more like a force that stifles the surge in drug consumption (escapism) rather than the other way around.
You didn’t answered his question, but just made suggestions that will leads to false conclusions. Tests had already shown other ASIC resistant crypto’s hash rate was completely unaffected by this nerf. Only ETH had hash rate quickly dropped to half within a short period of time. Thus the only logical conclusion can be made is NVIDIA had only target ETH algorithms and then activate VRAM bandwidth limiter to choke ETH mining algorithms. Thus it will in theory have zero impact on other tasks just like mining other less relevant cryptocurrency
The specific motivation is this - gaming is a core business for nVidia. Cryptocurrencies are a worthless fad that will experience another crash at the end of this market/Fed QE cycle. nVidia doesn't want to become hitched to that horse, as they have a long-term business they want to keep healthy.
Well money is money, be it crypto or gaming. And since regular GPUs can be used for either, there is no "hitch" to unhook. Historically gaming might have been how GPUs started*, but they're no more the exclusive domain of gamers, than they are GPGPU/AI/Machine learning/whatever, or crypto. In fact the latter two may put as much pressure on future GPU development as gaming. So maybe gamers need to start realizing it's not all about them, and stop claiming first mover privileges.
*The need to have something to see, and of course video.
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misel228 - Thursday, February 18, 2021 - link
"the software drivers for this graphics card will automatically limit cryptocoin hashing rates to half"How do they want to ensure that they're not cracking the drivers and/or writing they're own drivers. My understanding is that crypto mining has become so large that they have enough resources for this.
Hulk - Thursday, February 18, 2021 - link
There are ways to do it that cannot be bypassed. All you have to do is look at non-k Intel processors. They stopped overclocking and to date there have been no workarounds.But you are right in the fact that when a lot of money is at stake the resources are commensurately high. Eventually they'll realize they can just make their own dedicated hardware.
Seems like a lot of resources are being wasted simply to find target hashes.
Billy Tallis - Thursday, February 18, 2021 - link
Overclocking is trivially measurable at the hardware and firmware level. Detecting what a particular piece of software is trying to accomplish is an entirely different kind of problem.willis936 - Thursday, February 18, 2021 - link
You don't need to lock down that low of a level. It's easier to just make a hardware-software handshake that is difficult to crack. The N64 cartridge/coprocessor took nearly 2 decades to crack. I'm sure something even more advanced could be done with today's coprocessors.Billy Tallis - Thursday, February 18, 2021 - link
I don't understand what you're trying to say. The difficult problem NVIDIA faces here is not in making a secure lock, but in figuring out when it's supposed to unlocked or locked.For Intel CPUs, it's trivial to determine what is and isn't overclocking, and whether a given model is or is not supposed to permit overclocking. For NVIDIA, it is not simple to accurately determine whether a piece of software is a miner or some other GPGPU application. Their strategy of nerfing mining on consumer graphics cards will probably only work because GPGPU applications are still relatively few and far between, so there probably won't be too much fallout when NVIDIA's miner detector turns out to be overzealous.
NVIDIA is pretty much signing up to implement an antivirus engine in their GeForce drivers. That won't end well.
Butterfish - Friday, February 19, 2021 - link
NVIDIA is currently only targeting ETH which is the highest value ASIC resistance crypto, so they only need to look for memory pattern ETH generated as part of their ASIC harden measures.Cryptocurrency is also far less adaptable than viruses and are also highly visible. Every change in algorithm require a hard fork that split the coin into new and old which is a major disruption for the ecosystem. On the other hand, NVIDIA could just load updated vBIOS with each new batch of GPU they manufactured.
descendency - Saturday, February 20, 2021 - link
Is it ETH or ERC-20 based coins?twtech - Sunday, February 28, 2021 - link
It's a temporary fix - undesirable but better than the alternative - to mitigate long-term damage to their core gaming business due to inability to supply cards to gamers. They can rescind the limitations after this market bubble bursts, and crypto mining takes a backseat again.sonny73n - Friday, February 19, 2021 - link
Miners won't have to deal with the 3060. They'll just snap up the rest of the 3000 series as soon as those are available like they've been doing. In the end, the only card available for gamers will be the 3060.d8vjork - Friday, February 19, 2021 - link
Hope this isn't true (and I'm a miner, not that kind of miner that bought consumer-grade GPUs), at least this CMP HX give some hope on both sides, just if they're cheaper and more powerful than consumer GPUs will maintain miners out and stock also prices going downtamalero - Wednesday, February 24, 2021 - link
If you look at the figures given by Nvidia. Its the opposite. You will get worse chips that consume more energy. To resume, you will probably be getting those chips that failed the binning and are unsuitable for gamingSpunjji - Friday, February 19, 2021 - link
The funny bit here is that the 3060 is probably a better offer (relatively speaking) for miners than for gamers. It's looking to barely be any better than Turing's miserable RTX offerings at this price level.Butterfish - Friday, February 19, 2021 - link
NVIDIA could do a minor refresh for their entire lineup as some rumors had already suggestedTheinsanegamerN - Thursday, February 18, 2021 - link
That's also BIOS level firmware, not a windows driver.Samus - Thursday, February 18, 2021 - link
Gone are the days of turning a GeForce 2 MX400 into a $1000 Quadro with a 20 cent resistor and a bios flash.Fortunately it seems this nerf can be undone completely in software.
lmcd - Thursday, February 18, 2021 - link
*Unfortunately. It's a consumer card. Ethereum is inherently professional. Good riddance.Gigaplex - Thursday, February 18, 2021 - link
Ethereum is not professional, it's opportunistic.lemurbutton - Thursday, February 18, 2021 - link
Ethereum is not opportunistic. It's a scam, like all other cryptocurrencies. It's just less of a scam.TheinsanegamerN - Friday, February 19, 2021 - link
Etherium is as much of a scam as FIAT currencies like the US dollar are.Kangal - Friday, February 19, 2021 - link
Nah, gold WAS the real currency and that IS a scam. Gold has inheritly little/no value. It is not useful like copper. The properties of gold is that it is scarce, it is pretty, and (like religion) it is very very old culturally. Individuals, Tribes, Cities, and King/Kingdoms have gone to ancient-modern war over it. And so it is ESTABLISHED.Cash does not have the same privleges. Yet, gold has actually been superceded by Fiat Currency (EUR, GBP, USD, JPY, CNH). Why do I say this? It is because these have the most trust, most accepted, and most used at the current time.
Sure, you can go to shops and buy goods and services with gold, but it isn't as easy. Cash is King. Right now, Bitcoin let alone other cryptocurrencies don't have this status. They're not old like gold, nor used like cash. They don't have a use. They're only used to MAKE money or STORE money. Few have niche uses but it has nothing to do with it's value. Just trying to clear up some misunderstandings and fallacies.
youareamoron - Tuesday, March 16, 2021 - link
Not useful? What do you think you're using to post that dumb comment? Try researching more about industrial uses, you idiot.Ratman6161 - Saturday, February 20, 2021 - link
"Etherium is as much of a scam as FIAT currencies like the US dollar are."At least the US Dollar is backed by the "full faith and credit" of the United States. So unless the US government goes under, its not going anywhere and if that happened we would all be screwed anyway. Also, Dollars go through the banking system where there is regulation and oversight and the FDIC in case my bank did go under. \
Crypto currencies are backed by Vladimir Putin's Oligarch buddies (about 70%) along with their counterparts in China. So not only could the whole thing go belly up, but people who really don't like us could engineer it to happen.
Ill keep my money in good old $$.
brunosalezze - Thursday, February 18, 2021 - link
Well, nobody ever made big money overclocking before. And the number of people that really care is very small to matter, mining is a different beast right now.StevoLincolnite - Thursday, February 18, 2021 - link
Easy to bypass.Just don't update your drivers.
WaltC - Friday, February 19, 2021 - link
The problem could be solved if both AMD & nVidia introduced full-power cards with their video outputs permanently disabled--via laser. They could create an entirely new market for themselves. I don't understand what this has not already happened, actually.Threska - Saturday, February 20, 2021 - link
Oh like say GPGPU cards.frowertr - Friday, February 19, 2021 - link
It’s not “wasted” if profit is there. You must not be a raging capital like me.dersteffeneilers - Sunday, February 28, 2021 - link
Back in the Haswell days there actually were non-K overclocksprophet001 - Thursday, February 18, 2021 - link
If it's just a driver then what's to keep them from changing or hacking the driver to get it to do what they want.TheinsanegamerN - Thursday, February 18, 2021 - link
Nothing. This whole move from nvidia is a PR stunt.euskalzabe - Thursday, February 18, 2021 - link
Not really. It seems to be BIOS based. Firmware has to be signed, so it'd be a lot harder for any miner to crack this limitation.Wereweeb - Thursday, February 18, 2021 - link
PreciselyArsenica - Thursday, February 18, 2021 - link
Maybe if they implemented a not-downgradable firmware to all newly made GPUs that forces the mining limitations.But knowing Nvidia this whole effort will be just a patch. After all it's not as if Nvidia is losing money like when people use to mod Geforces into Quadros.
nandnandnand - Thursday, February 18, 2021 - link
It's just more deception from Nvidia.tomumu - Thursday, February 18, 2021 - link
From the efficiency figures, it seems like these mining chips must be on an older 12nm or 14nm node.SNESChalmers - Thursday, February 18, 2021 - link
Same Samsung 8nm. Just the worst of the worst yields.Wereweeb - Thursday, February 18, 2021 - link
Nope, they're just repurposing the borderline useless dies that would have otherwise been trashed.nandnandnand - Thursday, February 18, 2021 - link
Or they are undervolted RTX 3080/3070/3060 Ti. The TDP doesn't necessarily represent the power consumption.tamalero - Wednesday, February 24, 2021 - link
"The TDP doesn't necessarily represent the power consumption." no, but specifies the chip power-heat output. And that correlates with higher power.It's obvious that the chips will be the worst unsuitable gaming chips to run at lower freqs.
Spunjji - Friday, February 19, 2021 - link
That seems like a more likely proposition. If that's the case, then at least they'd actually be adding to supply rather than simply splitting it up more.R3MF - Thursday, February 18, 2021 - link
Presumably they do the same for refreshed 70/80 products.Can't legitimately take functionality from products already sold, but we all know the existing line is due for imminent replacement.
drexnx - Thursday, February 18, 2021 - link
those hash rates are pretty garbage for the TDP, worse than Pascal even!for example,
my 1060 3GBs hashed 22MH/s at 75w (before the DAG file outgrew their memory)
my 1080 is currently hashing 32.5MH/s at 110w
my 2080ti is currently hashing 57MH/s at 150w
Wereweeb - Thursday, February 18, 2021 - link
>For the TDPPrecisely. These will be bought in bulk by mining companies and undervolted/have their memory tuned. That will help bring the efficiency to a better level.
mattbe - Friday, February 19, 2021 - link
The numbers used in the tables are already "tuned" and "undervolted". In fact, to achieve those hash rates at those performance levels might not even be realistic for some miners.hansip87 - Thursday, February 18, 2021 - link
Unless Nvidia made a standalone 3060 driver to combat this i think it will still be hackable by miners.frbeckenbauer - Thursday, February 18, 2021 - link
Nvidia could just forbid it's partners from selling directly to Miners in China (and not sell pallets over pallets of FE cards directly to miners themselves)porina - Thursday, February 18, 2021 - link
I doubt the hashrates are reasonably comparable between Minerstat and nvidia values, likewise the power. No serious miner would run at rated TBP and it will be far below that. I'd guess nvidia hashrates are what you get at "stock" and typical mining tuning will improve that a lot. For example, minerstat says a 1070 does 27MH/s. I have a FE going at 21MH/s. I'm not a serious miner. I just turned down power limit, but didn't overclock ram. That likely explains a large part of the gap, even without going as far as mining bios for optimised memory timings.DanNeely - Thursday, February 18, 2021 - link
If it's not done via non-writable firmware it'll just get hacked around.It's good PR, and scaring some miners off from release day purchases isn't nothing, but it's not going to do much in the medium term.
Etherium's plan to switch from proof of pollution to proof of plutocracy later this year might help. Assuming that miners don't successfully fork ether to keep doing their thing; and assuming there aren't enough other GPU minable coins to switch to.
baka_toroi - Thursday, February 18, 2021 - link
>from proof of pollution to proof of plutocracyHahaha my sides!
Wereweeb - Thursday, February 18, 2021 - link
Of course they will fork, Etherium grew because GPU miners flocked to it.Also, great terminologies - they are more accurate than the original ones.
Spunjji - Friday, February 19, 2021 - link
Came here to say the same thing.DanNeely - Friday, February 19, 2021 - link
There's a difference between trying to fork and doing so successfully. If fork-ether doesn't capture enough of the larger userbase and ends up only worth a few percent of standard-ether it won't be able to blow up the broader GPU market anymore. The two existing forks fall into the two small to matter bucket: etherium classic is worth less than 1% of normal etherium and ether-zero is more or less worth nothing at a current price of ~0.3 cents.ragenalien - Thursday, February 18, 2021 - link
Your number for the Hash rate/Power are really off and only come close to that if they've been modified by the miners. Otherwise they're much close to nvidia's figures. The 3080 is a 320w chip and unmodified uses that or more for mining which is likely what nvidia is quoting for their 90HX. I'm sure some experienced miners will get that rate higher and drop the power target.ToTTenTranz - Thursday, February 18, 2021 - link
The only ones being saved by this move are nvidia themselves, at the cost of consumers never being able to take advantage of these when the bubble bursts and the RTX cards would be reintroduced to the market as 2nd-hand offerings.Availability for PC gaming consumers isn't going to increase because production is just going to shift to these cards that are cheaper to make (i.e. higher margins for nvidia).
And when mining ceases being profitable the miners can't sell these display-less cards back to gamers, who at that point have option other than buying whatever new GPUs nvidia has to sell them.
Miners will obviously know this so they'll target the gaming cards first, and the mining cards second.
So again: this is only good for nvidia.
euskalzabe - Thursday, February 18, 2021 - link
Good. I don't want a 2nd hand card that's been abused by mining for months.TeXWiller - Thursday, February 18, 2021 - link
I can't use those either for my personal use as I'd mostly use them for rendering with gaming on the side. Hopefully the driver limitation doesn't chew in to CUDA workloads, although for me OpenCL is still an option.Wereweeb - Thursday, February 18, 2021 - link
The only problem with used mining cards is that they might need new fans.0siris - Friday, February 19, 2021 - link
So then buy a new one instead of a used one? Why should other people not have the option to buy used mining cards because you don't want one? The existence of second hand mining boards is not limiting your ability to buy new; in fact, it lowers the prices of new boards because Nvidia has a smaller number of potential buyers when some people are buying second hand. That's the entire reason they're doing this.TheinsanegamerN - Friday, February 19, 2021 - link
My vega 64s are both ex mining cards, been running for 2.5 years now with no issues.Gastec - Friday, February 19, 2021 - link
And what if I buy a ex-mininng video card and it doesn't work propperly, do I take the loss and move on to buying another one? How much would I have to pay for two used video cards as opposed to buying a new one (which comes with guarantee and even 1-2 video games)?Spunjji - Friday, February 19, 2021 - link
If they're taking advantage of chips that would have otherwise been broken / uneconomical for gaming purposes, then it may not be all that bad. If not, then yeah, this sucks.As it is, though, there should still be a plentiful flood of gaming GPUs back into the market once this bubble bursts. Looks like I'll be waiting until then for my next build.
TheinsanegamerN - Thursday, February 18, 2021 - link
Utterly pointless, as a driver, this can be worked around in 2 seconds: load your mining software onto linux. Or just use an older driver. Or disable the check in the driver. There are so many ways around this it's pathetic.Honestly the best thing to do is simply continue supplying GPUs. Money is money, after all, and eventually the market will either stabliize or crash. The demand is there, frankly the biggest limit is A) production, which is hampered by the pandemic, and B) retailers, which goes without saying.
ET - Thursday, February 18, 2021 - link
Isn't NVIDIA's Linux driver proprietary?imaheadcase - Thursday, February 18, 2021 - link
They can easily roll out a driver update to existing cards that do the same thing, nvidia has for years made it clear that they can and will enforce certain security updates to users without them knowing, even via windows update if have to. Maybe not to linux? don't know how that works.But they can force all current cards to half rates as well if they want too..i suspect they might already doing it.
Good riddence, mining is the dumbest thing ever.
jeremyshaw - Thursday, February 18, 2021 - link
Sony can also remove a little used feature from their PS3s with no repercussions and alligator tears, right?mattbe - Friday, February 19, 2021 - link
You don't seem to have any idea what you are talking about.Crippling existing cards will be an automatically class-action lawsuit. There's legal precedence with the Playstation .and Linux Support. Nvidia is free to release new cards that half mining performance, that is fine. That doesn't apply to existing products already purchased by their customers.
“i suspect they might already doing it.”
No, they are not "already doing it".
Bluetooth - Thursday, February 18, 2021 - link
This is a bad way to fix the market. Limiting hash rate through driver should not be implemented until the new crypto cards are available on the market, as they will always find away around the limiting drivers. Nvidia is essentially disabling their products for certain usage.Spunjji - Friday, February 19, 2021 - link
They're doing it before release, so it's fair enough for them to do. The market has been informed.29a - Thursday, February 18, 2021 - link
I was thinking about this the other day.Samus - Thursday, February 18, 2021 - link
All considered aren’t ASIC’s still more cost/energy efficient than GPU’s for mining?DanNeely - Thursday, February 18, 2021 - link
For bitcoin like applications yes. But etherium was designed to prevent that sort of hyper-focused hashing; GPUlike compute cores and lots of GDDR is the most efficient way to mine it. At least one of the big BC mining companies designed an ether asic; but AFAIK never brought it to market because the upfront costs would exceed the marginal gains they could get vs just buying from AMD/NVidia. If future GPUs increase their share of RT cores, that calculus might change; OTOH etherium is planning to move away from compute based mining so... ¯\_(ツ)_/¯(And going farther down the process behind etheriums design are coins like monero that are only CPU minable. IIRC they need a ton of ram/core.)
Leeea - Thursday, February 18, 2021 - link
Even cutting the hash rate in half, it is still a massively profitable card. This sounds good and does nothing.As for the bypass, it will likely happen via custom bios. Most likely be flashing the card with a modified 3070 bios, to trick the driver.
drexnx - Thursday, February 18, 2021 - link
nvidia has used signed bioses since Pascal came out, Maxwell was the last architecture you could bios mod without the keys.Leeea - Thursday, February 18, 2021 - link
That is interesting, I did not know that.Then it will likely be a driver hack. Or just not bother, the card looks sadly profitable even at 1/2 mining speed.
euskalzabe - Thursday, February 18, 2021 - link
This, precisely. It'll be really hard for any miner, regardless of resources, to successfully install a custom BIOS.Silver5urfer - Thursday, February 18, 2021 - link
Did you see how much time it will take to make it break even ? "Massively Profitable" lolhttps://www.tomshardware.com/best-picks/best-minin...
In short they take a LONG time, but the pallets and pallets of selling with the damn PSUs and farms it makes a huge thing. That's the key here.
And even hating the Cryptobs so hard but I do not like the approach Ngreedia is doing, nerfing the GPUs is not good in any way, today it's this tmrw it will be another segementation bullcrap.
DanNeely - Thursday, February 18, 2021 - link
The big miners are buying directly from NVidia/card makers; their breakeven times are a lot faster because they're not paying scalper rates.nunya112 - Thursday, February 18, 2021 - link
maybe they need to block it at the hardware level remove the actual instruction ?? perhaps ??b0g4rt - Thursday, February 18, 2021 - link
Will caveat that I do own and use p106-100's (I picked them up during a low interest period from a mine that was shuttering a part of their gpu portion). Regardless any fab being used to produce a new crypto segment is not for the benefit of pc gamers, its simply another cash grab. If the HX cards aren't a good ROI miners will continue to buy the retail gpus & workstation cards because they can simply use firmware & drivers that mitigate what nVidia places in newer drivers. The lesson to learn in 2017 & 2018 was that gamers should be benefitting from unused clock cycles by conducting proof of work for a crypto network since it easily can pay for current/newer components. The lesson that needs to be learned from the current logistical predicament is not by miners (who are simply finding solutions that are available in a free market), nor gamers (who are never at fault in this conversation), but retail sellers who should have from the on-set treated this like toilet paper during the early pandemic (1-2 per customer & keep a rolling ledger of who has purchased), better api mitigations for auto-buying/bots, etc.Spunjji - Friday, February 19, 2021 - link
Indeed - hell, they could even have passed the extra admin costs onto the consumer (and then some). What's an extra $20 per card vs. several hundred in markup from a scalper. But it seems like most retailers preferred the easy route of shifting as much stock as possible as fast as possible.zodiacfml - Thursday, February 18, 2021 - link
Commendable but mixed feelings. The driver nerf is band-aid to the problem, it will come lose easily. Besides, the 3060 won't be Nvidia's best mining card though any decent gaming GPU right now is good for mining due to acute shortage.Can't say much about their dedicated crypto mining product until the price but surely is better solution than band-aid and would steal some market from dedicated ethash/eth mining products coming from China
Yojimbo - Thursday, February 18, 2021 - link
"As for consumers looking to get a video card for gaming purposes, today’s announcement is probably a bit of a wash."Are miners going to buy the cards with a lower hash rate at as high of a price just assuming that some time in the future they'll get the full hash rate? I don't think so. It will have at least some effect on the price of the cards at launch, and so it's not a wash for gamers, it's a win for gamers.
iranterres - Thursday, February 18, 2021 - link
HAHA, the setup was made public. Nvidia ditching customers in the name of the miners and so on. And also well done AT for this shit article.Yojimbo - Friday, February 19, 2021 - link
That was classic fake news passed around and embellished like a game of telephone.DigitalFreak - Thursday, February 18, 2021 - link
This is just Nvidia wanting to appear to be 'doing something'.They know the drivers will be hacked. Selling borderline chips as mining-only cards makes them extra money while doing pretty much nothing for the gamer who wants a card. As the article mentioned, unless the mining-only cards are a hell of a lot cheaper than the retail cards miners will keep grabbing up retail units. They can just resell them when the mining market goes south or something faster comes along.
Yojimbo - Thursday, February 18, 2021 - link
Miners don't resell cards so much. By the time they want to get rid of the old cards they are likely not worth very much because it's the miners who have pushed up the price of the cards to begin with. As for the newer cards, they'll just keep mining with them, also, because why would they sell low and buy high? They'll instead keep mining all the way down to the break even point waiting for the price of crypto to go up.Gigaplex - Thursday, February 18, 2021 - link
I don't understand these numbers. Even if you take a 3080, halve the hash rate, it still comes out ahead of the 50HX both in terms of hash rate and power consumption. Who would buy these cards?Yojimbo - Thursday, February 18, 2021 - link
Yes, I don't understand, either. Perhaps the numbers from the two different sources are not directly comparable.Yojimbo - Friday, February 19, 2021 - link
It seems like the new cards might be Turing cards, in which case I assume they will be sold for less than the 30 series gaming cards.Yojimbo - Friday, February 19, 2021 - link
It makes sense because they have probably built up a significant stock of Turing cards that couldn't make it as gaming cards but can be fashioned as miners, but they can't have very many Ampere cards like that as of yet.plonk420 - Thursday, February 18, 2021 - link
as much as i have a love/hate relationship with crypto (paid my rent a few times), i wonder if this will have a negative impact on compute projects like BOINC ...such as previously SETI@Home, now MilkyWay@Home, Einstein@Home, Folding@Home, etc...gizmo23 - Friday, February 19, 2021 - link
That was my first thought as soon as I saw it. I think GPU compute projects like F@H run CUDA on NVidia cards so maybe there's something that can be used to identify the job type in CUDAButterfish - Friday, February 19, 2021 - link
They aren’t running the same algorithm as ETH thus won’t be affected by this changeYojimbo - Friday, February 19, 2021 - link
Unlikely. I think it doesn't even negatively affect some other crypto algorithms. And the algorithmic checking is done in software, in the drivers. It's just that the drivers must undergo a handshake with the bios and the bios must undergo a handshake with the silicon. That means NVIDIA are completely free to adjust the mechanism on the fly with driver updates. As long as they don't come out with a valid driver version that is too loose, ie, that allows what it's supposed to limit, it should be OK. And it's easy to check that it's activating on the things that are supposed to activate it.I think the biggest issue is whether someone can create an algorithm that mines efficiently but that doesn't trigger the limiting function, because I am skeptical that people will quickly find a way to get around the security features on the chip. I guess we'll have to wait and see. The thing is, even if they either make a non-limited algorithm or they find a way to put on their own bios eventually, if NVIDIA gets, say, 6 months of it working as intended that's probably enough to see them through the current crypto boom period, and certainly gives them time to catch up with gaming demand for the new architecture.
Threska - Saturday, February 20, 2021 - link
Hmmmf. Sounds like the game publishers trying to stay ahead with DRM, just long enough to make back their money.Yojimbo - Sunday, February 21, 2021 - link
I guess you could say that. Except that's an ever-present situation. And it's also less clear how much the DRM is necessary. There was never a full disruption of game publishers' businesses. But in this case the disruption is both palpable and comes in sudden and unpredictable spikes.So many of these tech bloggers, for lack of a better word, like Linus Tech Tips from what I'm told (I haven't watched their video), either don't understand business or are just interested in saying what they think will get them more popularity or attention. They don't seem to understand the serious disruption that a mining craze has on NVIDIA's business or why NVIDIA would genuinely want to combat that disruption. It makes perfect business sense that NVIDIA would want to segment gaming and mining demand and be able to not let mining demand disrupt their gaming business. Concluding before the products even hit the market that NVIDIA are just trying to pull the wool over people's eyes is unfathomable.
Jumangi - Friday, February 19, 2021 - link
If this can be done at the driver level and Nvidia is serious about dealing with this then why just the 3060? Make the entire 30XX series do this. This sounds like a weak attempt at PR by them.JimmyZeng - Friday, February 19, 2021 - link
Existing miner will simply stop updating the driver.Yojimbo - Friday, February 19, 2021 - link
Firstly, it's not just at the driver level. The control is implemented at the driver level. It's entirely software, but the driver must be verified by the bios and the bios must be verified by the chip. Secondly, as JimmyZeng pointed out, if there's a valid driver available that already allows the feature then it's too late to stop. But thirdly, NVIDIA would open themselves up to lawsuits by limiting functionality after a purchase has been made.mike_bike_kite - Friday, February 19, 2021 - link
I'm trying to understand the article but basic info is missing. What is Ethereum? What is MH/s that's referenced in the tables? You gave a figure of $15/day profit for a 3090 but shouldn't your number also include costs like electricity and depreciation on the hardware? It would be nice to give some numbers of what happens if the the price of bitcoins returns to normal levels (is that possible?). I thought these crypto currency algorithms were designed to avoid these spikes in prices by getting much harder to discover new "coins" - is that not true?Tomatotech - Friday, February 19, 2021 - link
All good questions but this article is just an update on news affecting one part of the crypto mining industry. It’s not an explainer of the multiple basic concepts you’ve asked about. Google is your friend.0siris - Friday, February 19, 2021 - link
This is just Nvidia's way of ensuring that sales won't drop when Ethereum prices inevitably drop again. It has nothing to do with making more cards available to desktop users or making cards cheaper for miners, because Nvidia will just divert 100% of available silicon to mining boards for as long as they can sell them. Then when they can't shift mining cards anymore, there will suddenly be all the supply you could ever have dreamt of for desktop users; and conveniently for Nvidia, the desktop user will not be able to buy any of the second hand boards off of miners, so Nvidia gets another full price direct sale again. What a convenient coincidence.Remember kids: reusing, repairing and recycling is very bad for profits, so we can't have that. Miners are stuck with their cards instead of being able to sell them and desktop users are stuck buying new at full price instead of buying used; the only one who wins here is Nvidia.
Threska - Saturday, February 20, 2021 - link
Not crying. Why? Just got off a discussion about this subject elsewhere and to sum some gamers feel that they have first mover privileges (since their purchases drove the development of GPUS) and hence they should be at the head of the line. That's over miners, and GPGPU users which isn't the squeaky wheel in this fight.JimmyZeng - Friday, February 19, 2021 - link
MH/s/W, you realize Watt is a derivative unit from Joule/second right?JimmyZeng - Friday, February 19, 2021 - link
I see this as a pure manipulating PR stunt, they've said that they' put gamers 1st before, when they're selling Mining GPUs with DirectX disabled, have you ever seen a recent NV Gaming GPU with CUDA disabled? well miners might simply migrate to shaders anyway.I bet the limiter will be cracked in a couple days.
Yojimbo - Friday, February 19, 2021 - link
Seems unlikely that it's just a "PR stunt". What sort of "PR" would it give them to have their system circumvented in a few days? "NVIDIA is incompetent." Not good PR. SO if they are implementing it they are confident that it will work for a sufficient amount of time to make a difference in the market. That means a few months, perhaps.Not sure what your point is with a gaming GPU with CUDA being disabled. Of course they are not going to do that. CUDA is used extensively in CAD and render software. And when did they sell any GPU with DirectX disabled?
As far as using graphics mode for compute, NVIDIA has complete control over the ISA for their chips, and they don't publicly release it. NVIDIA is going to know how things will be executed in terms of instructions and how they can detect certain algorithms, and the people trying to make the algorithms work will mostly be trying to guess and check. If NVIDIA implements their check in an intelligent way it probably is not going to be an easy task for programmers to get around the limit in a reasonable period of time, ie, a couple of months. Eventually they might.
JimmyZeng - Tuesday, February 23, 2021 - link
> What sort of "PR" would it give them to have their system circumvented in a few days?"NVIDIA puts gamers first", that's what they're trying to tell, if that's not clear.
> Of course they are not going to do that. CUDA is used extensively in CAD and render software
That's not what gamers do, that part of the market was covered by Quadro, not GeForce.
> And when did they sell any GPU with DirectX disabled?
Check P106(and P102/P104), 1st gen miner GPU that were sold discreetly, IIRC DirectX/OpenGL/Vulkan are all disabled, leaving only CUDA enabled, the limit is driver only, users could still use an old driver to circumvent that.
I don't think the limiter could be implemented in hardware, in driver more likely, which could be cracked, not easily hackable like open source software, but crackable, especially when it is hugely profitable.
danjw - Friday, February 19, 2021 - link
This should happen across their lineup: RTX 3090a, RTX 3080a, RTX 3070a ...Simple firmware update to change the model name/number.
Tomatotech - Friday, February 19, 2021 - link
If the update is mining only, then more likely a silent update to the bios in the cards and the addition of a block to prevent downgrading.If miners buy the new cards without realising they’ve been updated that’s a win for Nvidia ...
Yojimbo - Friday, February 19, 2021 - link
They'd probably get sued if they did that.domboy - Friday, February 19, 2021 - link
"or simply silicon already manufactured that had defects in the video output pipeline." To me, that's the only way this makes any sense. Otherwise if they're just diverting GPU chips that could be in regular video cards to these dedicated cards without increasing the total amount of cards available. That said, I wonder if these mining cards could be used as a second (or third) card in an SLI setup... i.e. have some resell value once the miner is done with it.Zak90 - Friday, February 19, 2021 - link
So, Nvidia is releasing cards that are 'gamer-friendly' by crippling mining via a BIOS-Driver adjustment. AT THE SAME TIME(!!) they are releasing 'mining-friendly' cards suitable for...miners.Hmm...anyone spot the rather obvious issue we have here...??? Nvidia are currently unable to prevent pallet-loads of cards (gaming/miner - it doesn't matter) going direct-to-miners. How on earth is splitting up production going to help? Miners CLEARLY have sickeningly easy access to Nvidia/AIB warehouse stocks. Let's now factor a couple of remaining issues: miners clearly have the resources to get those BIOS and Driver files disassembled and functionality decoupled from any anti-miner checks. Additionally, miners may well want some reassurance of being able to sell all those cards once the 'boom' is over - and they ain't gonna sell Nvidia's 'miner friendly' cards.
Oh yes, do you see the issue with splitting production up?? - even LESS cards for gamers!
In the end Nvidia - YOU NEED TO STOP SELLING DIRECT TO MINERS AND GET ON TOP OF CORRUPT AIB's DOING THE SAME.
Threska - Saturday, February 20, 2021 - link
That'll just mean they'll be more creative in getting their cards.Gastec - Friday, February 19, 2021 - link
This "mining" of crypytocoins is among the worst things that happened to our modern civilization, comparable to the 20th century surge in drugs consumption.Oxford Guy - Friday, February 19, 2021 - link
And yet the video games that people are so excited about aren't much to write home about.I have yet to see any that seem particularly interesting.
willis936 - Saturday, February 20, 2021 - link
This is a strange comparison. Cryptomining is more like a force that stifles the surge in drug consumption (escapism) rather than the other way around.GNUminex_l_cowsay - Friday, February 19, 2021 - link
How is this going to affect the performance of other GPGPU applications?anemusek - Sunday, February 21, 2021 - link
Miners seid that o hash rate = OpenCL/Cuda performance. Eth is asic resistance and algorithms based on GPGPUButterfish - Monday, February 22, 2021 - link
You didn’t answered his question, but just made suggestions that will leads to false conclusions. Tests had already shown other ASIC resistant crypto’s hash rate was completely unaffected by this nerf. Only ETH had hash rate quickly dropped to half within a short period of time. Thus the only logical conclusion can be made is NVIDIA had only target ETH algorithms and then activate VRAM bandwidth limiter to choke ETH mining algorithms. Thus it will in theory have zero impact on other tasks just like mining other less relevant cryptocurrencybsd228 - Tuesday, February 23, 2021 - link
so is anyone going to want to buy a used 3000 series gpu from a stranger in a few months, knowing it has probably been running 24x7 the entire time.twtech - Sunday, February 28, 2021 - link
The specific motivation is this - gaming is a core business for nVidia. Cryptocurrencies are a worthless fad that will experience another crash at the end of this market/Fed QE cycle. nVidia doesn't want to become hitched to that horse, as they have a long-term business they want to keep healthy.Threska - Monday, March 1, 2021 - link
Well money is money, be it crypto or gaming. And since regular GPUs can be used for either, there is no "hitch" to unhook. Historically gaming might have been how GPUs started*, but they're no more the exclusive domain of gamers, than they are GPGPU/AI/Machine learning/whatever, or crypto. In fact the latter two may put as much pressure on future GPU development as gaming. So maybe gamers need to start realizing it's not all about them, and stop claiming first mover privileges.*The need to have something to see, and of course video.
Oxford Guy - Sunday, March 7, 2021 - link
Money may be money but demand is also demand.It’s not being met, yet Nvidia is having record wealth.
That means there is a big problem in the world of competition.
Covid has merely exposed the preexisting problems more than they were already exposed.