That's what I'd be expecting, but in theory, if mining has been a big impact on demand then the supply should be a little more adequate and - perhaps - the prices will end up reflecting that after a month or two.
@Oxford Guy - Good grief, you're easy to upset. I was speculating about what would happen *if* certain narratives have truth to them - *in theory* this move ought to provide evidence for or against one or more prevailing narratives.
This is a well crafted lie by Nvidia. Since the same chips will be used for the mining cards. What they did is just force market segmentation to avoid huge sales crash when the next mining bubble bursts. Because mining cards will be useless to players and players's cards will be useless for mining.
And there won't be any relief for normal players. They had 100 cards, and instead of making 100 gaming cards that can also be used for mining, they are doing 60 gaming cards and 40 mining cards now.
This is an ethical move as well as a PR move by nVidia.
Of course they would love to sell millions of cards to miners at top dollar, but there are two long-term issues that conflict with nVidia's survival. Ethically, mining is total bullshit. Mining accounts for more energy use than Facebook, Microsoft, Google and Apple combined. All to find imaginary money. nVidia's products being used to support such a climate scam is a bad image and that is mostly why you see these types of throttling moves. Then there is the obvious: regular people who don't want to spend thousands mining monopoly money and simply want to enjoy their lives socializing through videogames simply cannot afford to pay 2-3x the already ridiculous MSRP of mainstream cards. Mainstream used to equal $200 for a videocard, not $400 (currently $1000)
@tamalero - "Since the same chips will be used for the mining cards." This isn't entirely true, though. The awful e-waste mining edition cards aren't using GA106, and at least two of them are based on Turing. I'm in agreement that dedicated mining cards are a gross move by Nvidia, but it's not really relevant to what I was saying.
You either get a card or you don't. It will increase the number that get cards and decrease the number that don't, but it won't make the cards not sold out all the time. It should also reduce the prices scalpers are charging as the demand should be lower. As far as how much it changes these things, I think it's anyone's guess how much of the demand is mining-related. NVIDIA claims it's mostly gaming demand, but looking at the steam surveys I'd say that while a fair number of cards are ending up in gamers' hands it's not nearly as many as there should be. I think NVIDIA is applying spin to the fact that even without the mining demand the gaming demand would be sufficient to cause the cards to all be sold out.
I don't think it has to be spin. I'm in the electronics industry and the situation is fubar. Electronic components distributors like digikey are in full chaos on their own due to covid and increased demand, the manufacturers have extended lead times to 12-18 months for once always-available components, because demand is extreme. Some companies are already unable to deliver on contracts. Nvidia at least does not have a contract with their customers so they're flexible, but they're missing out on money.
Then on the logistics side, the situation with the containers is for sure not helping at all. It's expensive and they're not available, and everybody is looking for transport.
The same is also happening in another taiwan-dependent sector, bicycle parts manufacturing. They're running full speed and china-area business is busy, but it's not enough and there just aren't decent bikes available this season.
Chinese March exports rose 30%. The American economy is rebounding, and demand for semiconductors was always up in the pandemic, not down.
As for China's pandemic economy, the Chinese government financed spending through state-owned enterprises, which is why iron ore demand was so high. China didn't suddenly have a need for even more overbuilt infrastructure and construction. That is how China stimulated the economy. China's consumer demand was weak all of 2020. Domestic retail sales as well as their export sector are now rebounding.
Yeah it's true that even without mining demand gaming demand would be sufficient to cause the cards to all be sold out. What I meant by the spin is instead of saying that, they say that mining demand is really not so material. But that's not really accurate. Just because gaming demand is strong enough to sell out the cards doesn't mean that mining demand is not a significant percentage of the actual demand out there. And if as high of a percentage of cards were getting into gamers' hands as NVIDIA want to lead people to believe then there wouldn't be the impetus for them to put hash rate limiters on their cards.
"It should also reduce the prices scalpers are charging as the demand should be lower." That's what I'm getting at - I'm curious to see how much prices shift if, indeed, these are unappealing to miners.
"NVIDIA claims it's mostly gaming demand" Indeed, and I don't know how much to trust them either. I had the impression with the initial 3080 / 3090 release that Nvidia were doing poorly in terms of yield (and thus supply) and were eager to chalk it all up to demand (which is historically high, to be fair).
Nvidia's financial figures made me question that yield narrative - but then, as you've noted, market penetration of their products doesn't look that high either. The 3060 being based on a smaller chip should have helped with yield/supply if that was the primary issue, too. Yet people still don't seem to be able to get cards.
Basically I don't really know what to believe anymore. Clearly it's some toxic mix of yield/supply/demand from gamers/demand from scalpers/demand from miners, but none of the parties involved have any reason to be completely honest and lots of incentive to cherry-pick the factors that get the blame.
My opinion is that there are supply constraints and demand is very high. There are no unusual yield issues, that's just Taiwanese semiconductor industry propaganda against Samsung. Production is good from a historical perspective but it's not meeting demand. Demand from gamers is already very high - check out the Nintendo switch and the software sales, for example; even the ps4 saw a strong uptick - and with the crypto craze, demand is through the roof. NVIDIA is fighting hard to get the cards in the hands of gamers, but more cards are going to crypto miners than NVIDIA wants to publicly admit. What percedntage? I don't know. The majority are going to gamers. But last quarter crypto miners must have ended up with more than the $100 million to $200 million of gaming cards I seem to recall NVIDIA estimating. Things that need to be taken into consideration, however, are that a large percentage of cards are going into laptop and desktop systems, that these are going almost entirely to gamers, and that they take longer to get into the hands of consumers and show up in Steam surveys. I wouldn't be surprised if NVIDIA has got its board partners to shift a larger percentage of its modules than usual to pre-built systems in order to fulfill the strong demand from OEMs and to help insure cards get into the hands of gamers instead of crypto miners.
Just saw the recent Steam survey. Hardly any new 30 series cards showing up on the latest list. There's more 1650s, 1650Tis, or 1660Tis added than any 30 series card.
and steam survey is an accurate take and who is using what hardware ? hardly. i know quite a few people who either dont have steam, or have used it in quite some time. quoting what that says, is a small to medium fraction at best as to what hardware people have for hardware.
Yes, it is. It is a good indication of who is using what hardware, not who is buying what hardware. But when people buy new gaming hardware it's safe to say they use it. It's not a "small to medium fraction" by itself, although it could be useful even if it were. It's a large fraction. Most gamers use steam, maybe not exclusively, but they use it. Also, there's no reason to believe that people who buy the latest gaming hardware and don't play on steam have different buying habits than those who buy it and do. Steam survey results track well with the JPR research discrete GPU market share releases, as well. Claiming steam survey results aren't useful or accurate is just a last refuge of AMD fans who don't want to believe what they see. Somewhere there is a mystical place where gamers are playing on AMD cards that AMD never recognized revenue for.
Steams hardware survey has always been in doubt, and since it is optional it's impossible to know how accurate it is for the general population. I have myself never participated, most likely it's a good measure of what people use who doesn't know enough or care enough about integrity and what hardware they use. Regarding the supply vs demand issue it's a combination of a long delay between wafer order to actual chips (usually minimum 6 months, now much longer at TSMC and maybe more normal at Samsung) and shortage of substrates and packaging. Even if they could ramp up wafer production, there isn't enough substrate capacity as of now.
1650's are basically all you can get anymore because they are virtually useless for mining, and pretty poor gaming cards (they're around a GTX960) though something is better than nothing, even if its mid-quality 1080P.
@Oxford Guy - Okay, re-read it, still not sure how me posting something banal means I never get to respond to your blatant shitposting 🤷♂️ I guess I'm not as ratiomal as you 🤡
For once I'll give Nvidia the benefit of the doubt - the 3060 was the first time they released a hashrate limiter, so I do believe that they screwed up and inadvertently released the limiter-less beta driver. If they have learned the lesson, from now on every single branch of driver they release will include this limiter code, so any leak won't completely disintegrate their efforts.
I'm still overall against Nvidia being able to dictate what consumers do with their cards... but that implies a normal market situation. In the current pandemonium that is the GPU market, I'll accept these practices as temporary solutions. I'd love to be able to upgrade my 1060, after months and months of trying - unsuccessfully - to buy a 3000 series card.
While it makes sense to be against companies control what you do with your paid for hardware, and Sony sort of did something similar with the PS3 where it removed support for dual booting it into Linux in a latter revision, this is a weird situation where its changing their main market due to supply shortages.
Like, it would be if everyone was buying PS3s for playing blu ray and actual gamers couldn't buy the boxes to play any PS3 games than Sony would be in a similar predicament. I think at one point PS3 was the cheapest player actually, but it didnt rock the market like mining.
I bought one primarily, at least initially, as a bluray player as it was no more expensive than many of its rivals at the time, which had much lower overall capabilities.
It also had the advantage that its software was kept up to date for years longer than any of its fixed function rivals and I believe it implemented any updates to the standards/codecs/... that it was capable of supporting.
I would argue that the PS3 actually killed off HD-DVD, so in a way it really affected the market more as a blue ray player than as a games console. X-box is still around, HD-DVD is not.
"so I do believe that they screwed up and inadvertently released the limiter-less beta driver"
The beta driver doesn't remove the limiter. It just changes how the limiter works. It unlocks the limiter when there's a display connected and the number of PCIe lanes is 8 or more. To do that, they had to add new code. That wasn't an accident. The accident was that the driver made its way to the public.
They'll just bring out a new driver that limits the new coin, and silently release a new revision that requires that driver, exactly like they are doing now.
6 months later, once the miners have bought them all. Nvidia wants to make money above all else, gamers dont buy as much nor at as high a price as miners do.
Nvidia already do this by limiting GPU virtualisation and certain other professional features to their Quadro cards. I don't see this as being much different - they're not removing the facility from existing cards, they're segmenting their new products.
Absolutely bullshit move from Ngreedia. Castrating performance on the same SKU, but selling at same cost. Then demanding this nerf to be mandated. All for what ? Because Miner scalpers got that Pallets and metric tons of RTX series cards already but the normal users should not be able to do so ?
They sell the pallets and direct sales to miners but push this kind of crap onto consumers. So next is what ? You cannot use this GPU for X task or pay up for that eh. Still I'm going to bet the GPUs won't be in stock at all. Miners will still buy all these in lot and use them in farms.
I want that Antminer E9 to crush this scum of a corporate off this whole Mining sector. That ASIC Bitmain is extremely efficient over this Ngreedia scum 3090 cards in both Hashrate AND Wattage. Once that happens they can cough up all that blood. They want that Cryptomining crap cards only to be bought by Miners, LMAO they are already neck deep in their 30 series supply esp top end SKUs, this 1/2 rate castrated edition will also end up there and later pumped to the second hand market.
Nvidia is not new to such tactics their Pascal cards and up have vBIOS flash protection. With Turing that protection is even next level. I don't even know what is with Ampere, maybe even worse ? Much segmentation and artificial crippling.
The way you are meant to be played. AMD even though their compute performance tanked with RDNA2 vs GCN Radeon VII, they are not castrating their GPUs much better even though their RT and AI performance Is tanked.
Sounds like the rant of a minert. Once the new cards ship, miners won't be buying pallets of them anymore because their hash rate will be shit for the price.
Yes, it is possible that halving Ethereum algorithm computation is still not enough to make their cards horrible to miners' eyes, but still it is lowering the card value for them, which is better than nothing, as it requires a less than a complete crash of the crypto bubble to make these cards useless and be returned to the gaming market.
Pallet pricing =! MSRP do you think miners are buying these at the MSRP ? haha lol. And I don't even mine on my slow gpu, Nvidia is simply deciding what consumer has to do with their HW, you can ofc enjoy that direction.
And once the GPU launches you will see whether the Stock is there or not and then come back reply to your own comment.
Sounds like a rant of an Nvidia hater. He already calls it Ngreedia for not known reasons, but probably complete ignorance.
And it is the usual trick haters like to exploit when they want to hate with clueless arguments: 1. if the company does nothing, it is a "ngreeder" that just wants money and does not care about its historic customers and core business 2. if they act to try to somewhat mitigate the problem, they are unlawful because they don't allow you do what you want with the HW you have just bought Whatever they do they can be attacked, so they just move on the side they can do that.
And the clueless hating goes on by praising AMD and its worst performances: so AMD is good because its cards are so shitty in mining and do not require to be castrated being already so shitty and so AMD does not artificially limit you to do what you want with your HW. Impeccable reasoning of a perfect clueless hater that just wants to find a good side for its loved company. Even when there's not one resulting quite ridiculous. Clueless hater's involute thoughts, just to throw some more hate against a company that he doesn't like because it makes its preferred one a "do not care" on any modern aspect. Even the new crypto craziness.
Epic. I have an Nvidia card with me right now, I never even used any AMD card till date. While Ngreedia is yanking the performance off and going off rails trying to appease dumb people. I think I stepped on as snowflake of a corporate fanboy today who is blindly believing in this move thinking GPU market is going to be normal.
If you have a modicum of commonsense you would realize that if they really want to appease to gaming crowd, they would nerf the whole hashrate to 0. But they do not. Nowadays lack of commonsense is more keep on shilling for Ngreedia more.
Mining is just an enormous waste of electricity and resources to produce quite literally nothing, which is valued so highly only because of it's ability to anonymously be used for illegal and untraceable activities. To be quite honest, I hope nvidia gimps every single SKU with the same thing. Miners can seriously go f*** themselves. I've never seen a bigger waste of hardware resources in my life.
It's producing money, how can it be nothing when it's producing money ? Untraceable ? then why did US seize all the operations of Silk Road and others and now sitting on top of more than billions of dollars worth BTC. Crypto was born to be anon but it's not they can trace back to your wallet and your fiat currency, only one or two do it but in the end you will be caught. Period.
I do not even like this bullshit situation of GPUs and PC market due to Mining and TSMC shortage and artificial price hikes, but I even hate more that Ngreedia is dictating what consumer does. If one wants to power limit say a 3080 GPU and mine, they cannot do it because they castrated it.
Lol you are too naive man to see and dream how Miners are going to get shafted by this crappy move, they are having tons of GPUs already and made a killing out of them. Nvidia if really cares about YOU they should have made the hash rate to absolute ZERO on all GPUs and existing ones as well. They do not because they know where money is made and can be made.
It's not producing money. It's producing virtual coins that are valued at what they are due to their illegitimate uses.
The wallets exist, that's different than anonymous transactions. There is a reason that ransomware uses bitcoin - because the transactions are anonymous and dont need to be tied to anyone. It's completely unregulated and the only real value in cryptocurrency is for unlawful activity.
I dont really care what nvidia's intentions are. I'm able to vote with my wallet if I don't like what they're doing. I just hate miners, and I'm 110% in favor of what nvidia is doing. Miners are giant piles of shit and and deserve to get shafted in any way possible. Cryptocurrency mining has only negative effects. It's a monumental waste of electricity which produces vast amounts of pollution from the energy consumption, and makes hardware scarce and drives up the price for people who can actually make good use of it. All in the name of getting a few more digital coins. Oh boy!
The real problems are not the miners, are the ones that buy these virtual moneys at constantly higher prices because they just want to speculate on them. I agree that illegitimate use of the crypto coins exists and its a reason for this otherwise useless "service" to exists. But nothing would work and exists if for each illegitimate user there would not be thousands of lemmings buying the coins just because "tomorrow they will have higher values and make them rich". This a game already used in the past where people think that they can gain money doing absolutely nothing, and that game works as long as there are new users wanting to put fresh money in the game, raising the value. But a certain point, which can be even much higher than today, but it will undoubtedly come, there won't be so many new contributors and the game will start collapsing on itself. As more will withdraw, more value will be removed and more will escape creating an avalanche process.. the crash of the bubble. Few will claim to have become rich, some will make some money, some will loose little or nothing but many more will loose almost everything they out in the game.
And I agree this would be completely influential, as all other many times it happened, if the game would have not been based on wasting resources and energy. I really hope some country will start putting an end to this craziness, just for saving a bit of this already ill planet. For the money players of this game are making or loosing, I'm neutral, as it is a zero sum game.. whatever one gains is the lost of some other one(s). And not being a player I am not on any side of this.
Sorry but the Marketcap for BTC and ETH and even that crap unlimited supply DOGE is sky high, reaching to peaks. All that Mining HW and the control of the flow of money from Robinhood to Paypal to invest in Crypto on behalf of their profits you think this is going to be shafted ? China controls a lot of this industry, and more farms in US.
It's already heavily regulated. To trade and transact Crypto you need to provide all your details to the companies, more than what you give to Stock investments, you are hating it blindly. I also hate it how it killed the GPU market but your reasoning is dull and naive.
If Nvidia wants to share your thoughts and thinking that miners are pile of shit then I repeat, They would kill the whole hashrate to Zero. But they won't do it and they will never do it it will cause a huge loss for them in the short and long runs. Period.
They do not care about you or me, Ngreedia only cares about their profits. Why do you think they had a boatload of cash during Q42020 while the GPUs absolutely not being in stock all the fcking time ? Miners market simple. You pay more to Scalpers but that doesn't go to Ngreedia it goes to the Scalper but miners and the corporate relations to the OEMs ? It directly goes to Nvidia which is why the greedy scum never put gamers first, if they want I again repeat, they would nerf the GPUs to oblivion by silently pushing a HW revision in the middle of the supply chain AND flashing them with a vBIOS PLUS a Driver that completely destroys Hashing.
Inadequate competition and a few corporations (AMD, Nvidia, Sony, and Microsoft) killed the GPU market (also with Intel's assistance).
Blaming mining for the situation is cute but mining wouldn't have any sort of strangehold on the GPU supply if the companies that make them didn't want them to be used for mining.
What can we even say about the state of market, since the GPU systems began I was only aware of ATI Radeon and Nvidia GeForce, later I knew there was this Voodoo cards which have been forgotten by many that they existed.
Intel's bread and butter was x86 and Fabs, they squandered the lithography technology superiority, at one point Intel was far far ahead in innovative designs and Moore's Law advancement. It's all now reduced to ashes, lost in both of them and wasted tons of cash on their useless technologies branching out. So it's out of question that they would even venture into GPU, now they are doing it because they realized GPU importance.
About Console trash market, AMD is having TSMC issues so it's natural to see this, we already know AMD has high profit margins on that crappy SoC on those stupid boxes than a DIY PC market.
They know GPU math performance is needed for Mining, more than that Nvidia and AMD both have experience with the previous mining/crypto bubble. Why would they axe the massive profits ? They know for months that this is going to be case, but still they didn't give a shit about PC market, it's always about money always was. Even with 1/2 hashrate they will be sold out due to Farms and less supply.
If the Crypto crashed, this would definitely not be the case for sure. So mining caused it, people are right to hate it, but they are believing this bullshit move from Nvidia that is even more stupid.
Games Player are giant piles of shit. Games has only negative effects. It's a monumental waste of time and electricity which produces vast amounts of pollution from the energy consumption, and makes hardware scarce and drives up the price for people who can actually make good use of it. All in the name of getting a few more points. Oh Man!
It's not /producing money/. Only governments can do that. It's not even producing anything of /monetary worth/, either. Crypto's apparent value is entirely reliant on people buying into the scheme, which they do for 2 reasons: 1) Illicit transactions, like paying off ransomware assholes. 2) Thinking this pyramid scheme is an "investment".
When the bubble bursts, there would have been plentiful and dirt cheap GPUs for all. But because nVidia is intent on segmenting the graphics & mining markets, the mining cards won't be able to find a 2nd life with gamers. Bad for miners and gamers.
Bingo. Look at what happened last time when the crypto bubble burst. Nvidia had lied to their investors about what part of their record revenue from the previous quarter was due to crypto sales, and when that market suddenly fell away, their revenue plummeted and they once again lied to their investors on the earnings call to cover up the fact that they are obfuscating what percentage of their revenue is due to crypto compared to desktop. Can't have that again, have to segment the products so desktop users will be forced to buy new from Nvidia after the bubble bursts instead of having the second hand market flooded with cheap GPUs. Anyone who thinks Nvidia is doing this "for them" is laughably gullible. Nvidia will just keep selling everything they make to miners until the bubble bursts and then suddenly they will start shifting production to the desktop.
AMD and Nvidia could have sold GPUs that weren't so attractive to miners. Nvidia obviously saw how well AMD's stuff was doing the last time. Suddenly, rather than being so much worse than AMD's cards... But we're supposed to believe Nvidia cares so very much about PC gaming.
What does this driver enforcement mean for open source driver projects such as Nouveau? If this is their plan moving forward and it prevents alternate drivers, that'll piss off a large chunk of the Linux market.
Firstly, Nvidia is only selling one product with anti-mining tech. This inflates the price of that particular product. Nvidia's pricing is already inflated, even without the utterly insane situation we're in. So, this strategy of reserving the anti-mining tech for just one SKU is a strategy for inflating its price.
Secondly, Nvidia is not allowing customers to purchase better-performing parts for gaming that have the anti-mining tech. This pushes planned obsolescence faster, particularly given all the hype around ray-tracing in games like Cyberpunk. It's a slap in the face of the PC gaming enthusiast — Nvidia's 'You're free to buy a console' routine. In this case, the console is the midrange card you're stuck with at a premium price — just as the existence of the console scam causes premium pricing across the board due to them sucking down wafers and software titles (redundant walled gardens with games artificially restricted to just one 'console').
Thirdly, Nvidia — a very very wealthy company with very competent engineers, has already shown that it's not serious enough about this anti-mining stuff to do it properly. We don't give them the benefit of the doubt. They're not undergraduate university students; they are top professionals in charge of very expensive budgets. Lucy can keep her football, thank you very much.
Fourthly, if Nvidia were more serious about this situation it would release anti-mining drivers for the Turing line.
Nvidia sold plenty of SLI systems to people based on the fiction that those cards had the same amount of VRAM as the (at the time) premium-priced 980. That's just one facet of the scam's benefit to Nvidia, which — of course — was treated to the claim that it didn't stand to benefit.
'As a quick refresher, back in February with the launch of the GeForce RTX 3060 family of desktop video cards, NVIDIA implemented a novel throttling mechanism to artificially limit the Ethereum mining performance of the cards. This was done in an attempt to make the cards less palatable for miners – who have infamously been buying up cards in what is already a supply-constrained market – and thereby ensure more cards made it to gamers. Unfortunately for NVIDIA, this strategy worked for less than a month before the company accidentally released a driver without the full anti-Ethereum code in place, making it possible to mine Ethereum at full speed in some cases.'
Unfortunately for Nvidia? Are you kidding?
It wasn't done to make the cards less palatable for miners. It was done as a PR move and to inflate the demand/pricing for the card. Mainly, it was done as a PR move, as demand was plenty high because of the execrable situation we're in thanks to lack of adequate competition in multiple industries.
It also should be illegal to sell multiple varieties of the 'same' product without labeling them.
Restricting the functionality of one hidden variety of a product more than another is a form of bait and switch fraud.
TV companies should have been sued for their 'panel lottery' tactics, as one example of that. It's sad to see how passive consumers are in the face of things like that — and how toothless regulators are.
If they did that to say the 3070 which wasn't launched with these restrictions, perhaps you'd have an argument. It doesn't hold much for the 3060, even if they accidentally rolled back the limitation.
Until there's something they can deliver it all just seems like true noise in the system. " NVIDIA has also informed us..." I can imagine the number of people following these "news" has fallen drastically.
Well i can confirm that if you have the old version 3060 with the beta driver and put in a non lhr (mid may) 3060 when you remove the card since well its not recoginized your windows is terminated no way to salvage anything. No safeboot etc.
We’ve updated our terms. By continuing to use the site and/or by logging into your account, you agree to the Site’s updated Terms of Use and Privacy Policy.
Facebook
Twitter
RSS
87 Comments
Back to Article
Spunjji - Thursday, April 29, 2021 - link
It'll be interesting to see if these end up being available in any reasonable quantity and, if so, at what cost.Ryan Smith - Thursday, April 29, 2021 - link
Same cost and quantity as 3060s to date, I expect. It's a relatively small change in a big sea of demand.Spunjji - Friday, April 30, 2021 - link
That's what I'd be expecting, but in theory, if mining has been a big impact on demand then the supply should be a little more adequate and - perhaps - the prices will end up reflecting that after a month or two.Oxford Guy - Friday, April 30, 2021 - link
Oh please.Spunjji - Tuesday, May 18, 2021 - link
@Oxford Guy - Good grief, you're easy to upset. I was speculating about what would happen *if* certain narratives have truth to them - *in theory* this move ought to provide evidence for or against one or more prevailing narratives.tamalero - Monday, May 3, 2021 - link
This is a well crafted lie by Nvidia.Since the same chips will be used for the mining cards.
What they did is just force market segmentation to avoid huge sales crash when the next mining bubble bursts. Because mining cards will be useless to players and players's cards will be useless for mining.
tamalero - Monday, May 3, 2021 - link
And there won't be any relief for normal players. They had 100 cards, and instead of making 100 gaming cards that can also be used for mining, they are doing 60 gaming cards and 40 mining cards now.Samus - Wednesday, May 5, 2021 - link
This is an ethical move as well as a PR move by nVidia.Of course they would love to sell millions of cards to miners at top dollar, but there are two long-term issues that conflict with nVidia's survival. Ethically, mining is total bullshit. Mining accounts for more energy use than Facebook, Microsoft, Google and Apple combined. All to find imaginary money. nVidia's products being used to support such a climate scam is a bad image and that is mostly why you see these types of throttling moves. Then there is the obvious: regular people who don't want to spend thousands mining monopoly money and simply want to enjoy their lives socializing through videogames simply cannot afford to pay 2-3x the already ridiculous MSRP of mainstream cards. Mainstream used to equal $200 for a videocard, not $400 (currently $1000)
Spunjji - Tuesday, May 18, 2021 - link
@tamalero - "Since the same chips will be used for the mining cards."This isn't entirely true, though. The awful e-waste mining edition cards aren't using GA106, and at least two of them are based on Turing. I'm in agreement that dedicated mining cards are a gross move by Nvidia, but it's not really relevant to what I was saying.
Yojimbo - Thursday, April 29, 2021 - link
You either get a card or you don't. It will increase the number that get cards and decrease the number that don't, but it won't make the cards not sold out all the time. It should also reduce the prices scalpers are charging as the demand should be lower. As far as how much it changes these things, I think it's anyone's guess how much of the demand is mining-related. NVIDIA claims it's mostly gaming demand, but looking at the steam surveys I'd say that while a fair number of cards are ending up in gamers' hands it's not nearly as many as there should be. I think NVIDIA is applying spin to the fact that even without the mining demand the gaming demand would be sufficient to cause the cards to all be sold out.Murloc - Thursday, April 29, 2021 - link
I don't think it has to be spin. I'm in the electronics industry and the situation is fubar. Electronic components distributors like digikey are in full chaos on their own due to covid and increased demand, the manufacturers have extended lead times to 12-18 months for once always-available components, because demand is extreme.Some companies are already unable to deliver on contracts. Nvidia at least does not have a contract with their customers so they're flexible, but they're missing out on money.
Then on the logistics side, the situation with the containers is for sure not helping at all. It's expensive and they're not available, and everybody is looking for transport.
The same is also happening in another taiwan-dependent sector, bicycle parts manufacturing. They're running full speed and china-area business is busy, but it's not enough and there just aren't decent bikes available this season.
Murloc - Thursday, April 29, 2021 - link
*china-area business is growing a lot, unlike western economies which were/are still in lockdownYojimbo - Thursday, April 29, 2021 - link
Chinese March exports rose 30%. The American economy is rebounding, and demand for semiconductors was always up in the pandemic, not down.As for China's pandemic economy, the Chinese government financed spending through state-owned enterprises, which is why iron ore demand was so high. China didn't suddenly have a need for even more overbuilt infrastructure and construction. That is how China stimulated the economy. China's consumer demand was weak all of 2020. Domestic retail sales as well as their export sector are now rebounding.
Yojimbo - Thursday, April 29, 2021 - link
Yeah it's true that even without mining demand gaming demand would be sufficient to cause the cards to all be sold out. What I meant by the spin is instead of saying that, they say that mining demand is really not so material. But that's not really accurate. Just because gaming demand is strong enough to sell out the cards doesn't mean that mining demand is not a significant percentage of the actual demand out there. And if as high of a percentage of cards were getting into gamers' hands as NVIDIA want to lead people to believe then there wouldn't be the impetus for them to put hash rate limiters on their cards.Spunjji - Friday, April 30, 2021 - link
^ This.Spunjji - Friday, April 30, 2021 - link
"It should also reduce the prices scalpers are charging as the demand should be lower."That's what I'm getting at - I'm curious to see how much prices shift if, indeed, these are unappealing to miners.
"NVIDIA claims it's mostly gaming demand"
Indeed, and I don't know how much to trust them either. I had the impression with the initial 3080 / 3090 release that Nvidia were doing poorly in terms of yield (and thus supply) and were eager to chalk it all up to demand (which is historically high, to be fair).
Nvidia's financial figures made me question that yield narrative - but then, as you've noted, market penetration of their products doesn't look that high either. The 3060 being based on a smaller chip should have helped with yield/supply if that was the primary issue, too. Yet people still don't seem to be able to get cards.
Basically I don't really know what to believe anymore. Clearly it's some toxic mix of yield/supply/demand from gamers/demand from scalpers/demand from miners, but none of the parties involved have any reason to be completely honest and lots of incentive to cherry-pick the factors that get the blame.
Yojimbo - Saturday, May 1, 2021 - link
My opinion is that there are supply constraints and demand is very high. There are no unusual yield issues, that's just Taiwanese semiconductor industry propaganda against Samsung. Production is good from a historical perspective but it's not meeting demand. Demand from gamers is already very high - check out the Nintendo switch and the software sales, for example; even the ps4 saw a strong uptick - and with the crypto craze, demand is through the roof. NVIDIA is fighting hard to get the cards in the hands of gamers, but more cards are going to crypto miners than NVIDIA wants to publicly admit. What percedntage? I don't know. The majority are going to gamers. But last quarter crypto miners must have ended up with more than the $100 million to $200 million of gaming cards I seem to recall NVIDIA estimating. Things that need to be taken into consideration, however, are that a large percentage of cards are going into laptop and desktop systems, that these are going almost entirely to gamers, and that they take longer to get into the hands of consumers and show up in Steam surveys. I wouldn't be surprised if NVIDIA has got its board partners to shift a larger percentage of its modules than usual to pre-built systems in order to fulfill the strong demand from OEMs and to help insure cards get into the hands of gamers instead of crypto miners.Yojimbo - Sunday, May 2, 2021 - link
Just saw the recent Steam survey. Hardly any new 30 series cards showing up on the latest list. There's more 1650s, 1650Tis, or 1660Tis added than any 30 series card.Qasar - Monday, May 3, 2021 - link
and steam survey is an accurate take and who is using what hardware ? hardly. i know quite a few people who either dont have steam, or have used it in quite some time. quoting what that says, is a small to medium fraction at best as to what hardware people have for hardware.Yojimbo - Monday, May 3, 2021 - link
Yes, it is. It is a good indication of who is using what hardware, not who is buying what hardware. But when people buy new gaming hardware it's safe to say they use it. It's not a "small to medium fraction" by itself, although it could be useful even if it were. It's a large fraction. Most gamers use steam, maybe not exclusively, but they use it. Also, there's no reason to believe that people who buy the latest gaming hardware and don't play on steam have different buying habits than those who buy it and do. Steam survey results track well with the JPR research discrete GPU market share releases, as well. Claiming steam survey results aren't useful or accurate is just a last refuge of AMD fans who don't want to believe what they see. Somewhere there is a mystical place where gamers are playing on AMD cards that AMD never recognized revenue for.Zoolook - Wednesday, May 5, 2021 - link
Steams hardware survey has always been in doubt, and since it is optional it's impossible to know how accurate it is for the general population. I have myself never participated, most likely it's a good measure of what people use who doesn't know enough or care enough about integrity and what hardware they use.Regarding the supply vs demand issue it's a combination of a long delay between wafer order to actual chips (usually minimum 6 months, now much longer at TSMC and maybe more normal at Samsung) and shortage of substrates and packaging. Even if they could ramp up wafer production, there isn't enough substrate capacity as of now.
Samus - Wednesday, May 5, 2021 - link
1650's are basically all you can get anymore because they are virtually useless for mining, and pretty poor gaming cards (they're around a GTX960) though something is better than nothing, even if its mid-quality 1080P.Oxford Guy - Friday, April 30, 2021 - link
'It'll be interesting to see if these end up being available in any reasonable quantity and, if so, at what cost.'The next time you want to complain about the quality of my posts, re-read banality like that.
Spunjji - Tuesday, May 18, 2021 - link
@Oxford Guy - Okay, re-read it, still not sure how me posting something banal means I never get to respond to your blatant shitposting 🤷♂️ I guess I'm not as ratiomal as you 🤡eek2121 - Saturday, May 1, 2021 - link
There is already an exploit for these cards. You can change the PCIE ID via a virtualization hack in Linux.euskalzabe - Thursday, April 29, 2021 - link
For once I'll give Nvidia the benefit of the doubt - the 3060 was the first time they released a hashrate limiter, so I do believe that they screwed up and inadvertently released the limiter-less beta driver. If they have learned the lesson, from now on every single branch of driver they release will include this limiter code, so any leak won't completely disintegrate their efforts.I'm still overall against Nvidia being able to dictate what consumers do with their cards... but that implies a normal market situation. In the current pandemonium that is the GPU market, I'll accept these practices as temporary solutions. I'd love to be able to upgrade my 1060, after months and months of trying - unsuccessfully - to buy a 3000 series card.
webdoctors - Thursday, April 29, 2021 - link
While it makes sense to be against companies control what you do with your paid for hardware, and Sony sort of did something similar with the PS3 where it removed support for dual booting it into Linux in a latter revision, this is a weird situation where its changing their main market due to supply shortages.Like, it would be if everyone was buying PS3s for playing blu ray and actual gamers couldn't buy the boxes to play any PS3 games than Sony would be in a similar predicament. I think at one point PS3 was the cheapest player actually, but it didnt rock the market like mining.
RBFL - Thursday, April 29, 2021 - link
I bought one primarily, at least initially, as a bluray player as it was no more expensive than many of its rivals at the time, which had much lower overall capabilities.It also had the advantage that its software was kept up to date for years longer than any of its fixed function rivals and I believe it implemented any updates to the standards/codecs/... that it was capable of supporting.
It finished its life mainly as a games machine.
Zoolook - Wednesday, May 5, 2021 - link
I would argue that the PS3 actually killed off HD-DVD, so in a way it really affected the market more as a blue ray player than as a games console. X-box is still around, HD-DVD is not.Chaser - Thursday, April 29, 2021 - link
Nvidia can "dictate" with their products all they like. While you can choose to dictate where your wallet will go.TheinsanegamerN - Monday, May 3, 2021 - link
Still anti consumer.nandnandnand - Thursday, April 29, 2021 - link
This is anti-consumer garbage. It only works as PR.Gigaplex - Thursday, April 29, 2021 - link
"so I do believe that they screwed up and inadvertently released the limiter-less beta driver"The beta driver doesn't remove the limiter. It just changes how the limiter works. It unlocks the limiter when there's a display connected and the number of PCIe lanes is 8 or more. To do that, they had to add new code. That wasn't an accident. The accident was that the driver made its way to the public.
haukionkannel - Friday, April 30, 2021 - link
And still a limiter to one coin… as soon as there is ”new” Big thing… these limiters are useless…Dribble - Sunday, May 2, 2021 - link
They'll just bring out a new driver that limits the new coin, and silently release a new revision that requires that driver, exactly like they are doing now.TheinsanegamerN - Monday, May 3, 2021 - link
6 months later, once the miners have bought them all. Nvidia wants to make money above all else, gamers dont buy as much nor at as high a price as miners do.Spunjji - Friday, April 30, 2021 - link
Nvidia already do this by limiting GPU virtualisation and certain other professional features to their Quadro cards. I don't see this as being much different - they're not removing the facility from existing cards, they're segmenting their new products.Silver5urfer - Thursday, April 29, 2021 - link
Absolutely bullshit move from Ngreedia. Castrating performance on the same SKU, but selling at same cost. Then demanding this nerf to be mandated. All for what ? Because Miner scalpers got that Pallets and metric tons of RTX series cards already but the normal users should not be able to do so ?They sell the pallets and direct sales to miners but push this kind of crap onto consumers. So next is what ? You cannot use this GPU for X task or pay up for that eh. Still I'm going to bet the GPUs won't be in stock at all. Miners will still buy all these in lot and use them in farms.
I want that Antminer E9 to crush this scum of a corporate off this whole Mining sector. That ASIC Bitmain is extremely efficient over this Ngreedia scum 3090 cards in both Hashrate AND Wattage. Once that happens they can cough up all that blood. They want that Cryptomining crap cards only to be bought by Miners, LMAO they are already neck deep in their 30 series supply esp top end SKUs, this 1/2 rate castrated edition will also end up there and later pumped to the second hand market.
Nvidia is not new to such tactics their Pascal cards and up have vBIOS flash protection. With Turing that protection is even next level. I don't even know what is with Ampere, maybe even worse ? Much segmentation and artificial crippling.
The way you are meant to be played. AMD even though their compute performance tanked with RDNA2 vs GCN Radeon VII, they are not castrating their GPUs much better even though their RT and AI performance Is tanked.
DigitalFreak - Thursday, April 29, 2021 - link
Sounds like the rant of a minert. Once the new cards ship, miners won't be buying pallets of them anymore because their hash rate will be shit for the price.TheinsanegamerN - Thursday, April 29, 2021 - link
Etherium is worth thousands now, miners will continue to buy and find a way to bypass restrictions, like they always do.CiccioB - Thursday, April 29, 2021 - link
Yes, it is possible that halving Ethereum algorithm computation is still not enough to make their cards horrible to miners' eyes, but still it is lowering the card value for them, which is better than nothing, as it requires a less than a complete crash of the crypto bubble to make these cards useless and be returned to the gaming market.Silver5urfer - Thursday, April 29, 2021 - link
Pallet pricing =! MSRP do you think miners are buying these at the MSRP ? haha lol. And I don't even mine on my slow gpu, Nvidia is simply deciding what consumer has to do with their HW, you can ofc enjoy that direction.And once the GPU launches you will see whether the Stock is there or not and then come back reply to your own comment.
CiccioB - Thursday, April 29, 2021 - link
Sounds like a rant of an Nvidia hater.He already calls it Ngreedia for not known reasons, but probably complete ignorance.
And it is the usual trick haters like to exploit when they want to hate with clueless arguments:
1. if the company does nothing, it is a "ngreeder" that just wants money and does not care about its historic customers and core business
2. if they act to try to somewhat mitigate the problem, they are unlawful because they don't allow you do what you want with the HW you have just bought
Whatever they do they can be attacked, so they just move on the side they can do that.
And the clueless hating goes on by praising AMD and its worst performances: so AMD is good because its cards are so shitty in mining and do not require to be castrated being already so shitty and so AMD does not artificially limit you to do what you want with your HW.
Impeccable reasoning of a perfect clueless hater that just wants to find a good side for its loved company. Even when there's not one resulting quite ridiculous.
Clueless hater's involute thoughts, just to throw some more hate against a company that he doesn't like because it makes its preferred one a "do not care" on any modern aspect. Even the new crypto craziness.
Silver5urfer - Thursday, April 29, 2021 - link
Epic. I have an Nvidia card with me right now, I never even used any AMD card till date. While Ngreedia is yanking the performance off and going off rails trying to appease dumb people. I think I stepped on as snowflake of a corporate fanboy today who is blindly believing in this move thinking GPU market is going to be normal.If you have a modicum of commonsense you would realize that if they really want to appease to gaming crowd, they would nerf the whole hashrate to 0. But they do not. Nowadays lack of commonsense is more keep on shilling for Ngreedia more.
inighthawki - Thursday, April 29, 2021 - link
Mining is just an enormous waste of electricity and resources to produce quite literally nothing, which is valued so highly only because of it's ability to anonymously be used for illegal and untraceable activities. To be quite honest, I hope nvidia gimps every single SKU with the same thing. Miners can seriously go f*** themselves. I've never seen a bigger waste of hardware resources in my life.Silver5urfer - Thursday, April 29, 2021 - link
It's producing money, how can it be nothing when it's producing money ? Untraceable ? then why did US seize all the operations of Silk Road and others and now sitting on top of more than billions of dollars worth BTC. Crypto was born to be anon but it's not they can trace back to your wallet and your fiat currency, only one or two do it but in the end you will be caught. Period.I do not even like this bullshit situation of GPUs and PC market due to Mining and TSMC shortage and artificial price hikes, but I even hate more that Ngreedia is dictating what consumer does. If one wants to power limit say a 3080 GPU and mine, they cannot do it because they castrated it.
Lol you are too naive man to see and dream how Miners are going to get shafted by this crappy move, they are having tons of GPUs already and made a killing out of them. Nvidia if really cares about YOU they should have made the hash rate to absolute ZERO on all GPUs and existing ones as well. They do not because they know where money is made and can be made.
inighthawki - Thursday, April 29, 2021 - link
It's not producing money. It's producing virtual coins that are valued at what they are due to their illegitimate uses.The wallets exist, that's different than anonymous transactions. There is a reason that ransomware uses bitcoin - because the transactions are anonymous and dont need to be tied to anyone. It's completely unregulated and the only real value in cryptocurrency is for unlawful activity.
I dont really care what nvidia's intentions are. I'm able to vote with my wallet if I don't like what they're doing. I just hate miners, and I'm 110% in favor of what nvidia is doing. Miners are giant piles of shit and and deserve to get shafted in any way possible. Cryptocurrency mining has only negative effects. It's a monumental waste of electricity which produces vast amounts of pollution from the energy consumption, and makes hardware scarce and drives up the price for people who can actually make good use of it. All in the name of getting a few more digital coins. Oh boy!
CiccioB - Thursday, April 29, 2021 - link
The real problems are not the miners, are the ones that buy these virtual moneys at constantly higher prices because they just want to speculate on them.I agree that illegitimate use of the crypto coins exists and its a reason for this otherwise useless "service" to exists.
But nothing would work and exists if for each illegitimate user there would not be thousands of lemmings buying the coins just because "tomorrow they will have higher values and make them rich".
This a game already used in the past where people think that they can gain money doing absolutely nothing, and that game works as long as there are new users wanting to put fresh money in the game, raising the value. But a certain point, which can be even much higher than today, but it will undoubtedly come, there won't be so many new contributors and the game will start collapsing on itself. As more will withdraw, more value will be removed and more will escape creating an avalanche process.. the crash of the bubble. Few will claim to have become rich, some will make some money, some will loose little or nothing but many more will loose almost everything they out in the game.
And I agree this would be completely influential, as all other many times it happened, if the game would have not been based on wasting resources and energy.
I really hope some country will start putting an end to this craziness, just for saving a bit of this already ill planet. For the money players of this game are making or loosing, I'm neutral, as it is a zero sum game.. whatever one gains is the lost of some other one(s). And not being a player I am not on any side of this.
Silver5urfer - Thursday, April 29, 2021 - link
Sorry but the Marketcap for BTC and ETH and even that crap unlimited supply DOGE is sky high, reaching to peaks. All that Mining HW and the control of the flow of money from Robinhood to Paypal to invest in Crypto on behalf of their profits you think this is going to be shafted ? China controls a lot of this industry, and more farms in US.It's already heavily regulated. To trade and transact Crypto you need to provide all your details to the companies, more than what you give to Stock investments, you are hating it blindly. I also hate it how it killed the GPU market but your reasoning is dull and naive.
If Nvidia wants to share your thoughts and thinking that miners are pile of shit then I repeat, They would kill the whole hashrate to Zero. But they won't do it and they will never do it it will cause a huge loss for them in the short and long runs. Period.
They do not care about you or me, Ngreedia only cares about their profits. Why do you think they had a boatload of cash during Q42020 while the GPUs absolutely not being in stock all the fcking time ? Miners market simple. You pay more to Scalpers but that doesn't go to Ngreedia it goes to the Scalper but miners and the corporate relations to the OEMs ? It directly goes to Nvidia which is why the greedy scum never put gamers first, if they want I again repeat, they would nerf the GPUs to oblivion by silently pushing a HW revision in the middle of the supply chain AND flashing them with a vBIOS PLUS a Driver that completely destroys Hashing.
Oxford Guy - Thursday, April 29, 2021 - link
'I also hate it how it killed the GPU market'It did NOT kill the GPU market.
Inadequate competition and a few corporations (AMD, Nvidia, Sony, and Microsoft) killed the GPU market (also with Intel's assistance).
Blaming mining for the situation is cute but mining wouldn't have any sort of strangehold on the GPU supply if the companies that make them didn't want them to be used for mining.
Oxford Guy - Thursday, April 29, 2021 - link
And Nvidia, of course.The mining-induced shortages are just as intentional as the engineered boom and bust economic cycles.
Silver5urfer - Saturday, May 1, 2021 - link
What can we even say about the state of market, since the GPU systems began I was only aware of ATI Radeon and Nvidia GeForce, later I knew there was this Voodoo cards which have been forgotten by many that they existed.Intel's bread and butter was x86 and Fabs, they squandered the lithography technology superiority, at one point Intel was far far ahead in innovative designs and Moore's Law advancement. It's all now reduced to ashes, lost in both of them and wasted tons of cash on their useless technologies branching out. So it's out of question that they would even venture into GPU, now they are doing it because they realized GPU importance.
About Console trash market, AMD is having TSMC issues so it's natural to see this, we already know AMD has high profit margins on that crappy SoC on those stupid boxes than a DIY PC market.
They know GPU math performance is needed for Mining, more than that Nvidia and AMD both have experience with the previous mining/crypto bubble. Why would they axe the massive profits ? They know for months that this is going to be case, but still they didn't give a shit about PC market, it's always about money always was. Even with 1/2 hashrate they will be sold out due to Farms and less supply.
If the Crypto crashed, this would definitely not be the case for sure. So mining caused it, people are right to hate it, but they are believing this bullshit move from Nvidia that is even more stupid.
atirado - Monday, May 3, 2021 - link
@SilverSurfer,When exactly did you get into GPUs?
Voodoo cards essentially created the market for GPUs along games like Doom. They are forgotten now because they could not keep up with nVidia.
Oxford Guy - Thursday, April 29, 2021 - link
'It's not producing money.'Is fiat currency producing money? Who says so — militaries armed with nukes?
Spunjji - Friday, April 30, 2021 - link
Yes, and yes they do, and that counts for something whether you like it or not 🤷♂️Oxford Guy - Friday, April 30, 2021 - link
Missed the the point, eh?Spunjji - Tuesday, May 18, 2021 - link
Yes, you did.dromoxen - Sunday, May 2, 2021 - link
Games Player are giant piles of shit. Games has only negative effects. It's a monumental waste of time and electricity which produces vast amounts of pollution from the energy consumption, and makes hardware scarce and drives up the price for people who can actually make good use of it. All in the name of getting a few more points. Oh Man!Spunjji - Friday, April 30, 2021 - link
It's not /producing money/. Only governments can do that. It's not even producing anything of /monetary worth/, either. Crypto's apparent value is entirely reliant on people buying into the scheme, which they do for 2 reasons:1) Illicit transactions, like paying off ransomware assholes.
2) Thinking this pyramid scheme is an "investment".
voicequal - Thursday, April 29, 2021 - link
When the bubble bursts, there would have been plentiful and dirt cheap GPUs for all. But because nVidia is intent on segmenting the graphics & mining markets, the mining cards won't be able to find a 2nd life with gamers. Bad for miners and gamers.0siris - Friday, April 30, 2021 - link
Bingo. Look at what happened last time when the crypto bubble burst. Nvidia had lied to their investors about what part of their record revenue from the previous quarter was due to crypto sales, and when that market suddenly fell away, their revenue plummeted and they once again lied to their investors on the earnings call to cover up the fact that they are obfuscating what percentage of their revenue is due to crypto compared to desktop. Can't have that again, have to segment the products so desktop users will be forced to buy new from Nvidia after the bubble bursts instead of having the second hand market flooded with cheap GPUs. Anyone who thinks Nvidia is doing this "for them" is laughably gullible. Nvidia will just keep selling everything they make to miners until the bubble bursts and then suddenly they will start shifting production to the desktop.Oxford Guy - Friday, April 30, 2021 - link
AMD and Nvidia could have sold GPUs that weren't so attractive to miners. Nvidia obviously saw how well AMD's stuff was doing the last time. Suddenly, rather than being so much worse than AMD's cards... But we're supposed to believe Nvidia cares so very much about PC gaming.Silver5urfer - Saturday, May 1, 2021 - link
Only people who can think with commonsense can understand this and what you said. Since you can already see most of them praising this bullshit move.29a - Thursday, April 29, 2021 - link
This is not new, the Quadro line has used software for years to create different product tiers using the same hardware as the mainstream cards.dromoxen - Sunday, May 2, 2021 - link
You can sell a gfx card when its no longer profitable ... try playing DooM EternaL on that AsiC .Gigaplex - Thursday, April 29, 2021 - link
What does this driver enforcement mean for open source driver projects such as Nouveau? If this is their plan moving forward and it prevents alternate drivers, that'll piss off a large chunk of the Linux market.Oxford Guy - Thursday, April 29, 2021 - link
Gross.Firstly, Nvidia is only selling one product with anti-mining tech. This inflates the price of that particular product. Nvidia's pricing is already inflated, even without the utterly insane situation we're in. So, this strategy of reserving the anti-mining tech for just one SKU is a strategy for inflating its price.
Secondly, Nvidia is not allowing customers to purchase better-performing parts for gaming that have the anti-mining tech. This pushes planned obsolescence faster, particularly given all the hype around ray-tracing in games like Cyberpunk. It's a slap in the face of the PC gaming enthusiast — Nvidia's 'You're free to buy a console' routine. In this case, the console is the midrange card you're stuck with at a premium price — just as the existence of the console scam causes premium pricing across the board due to them sucking down wafers and software titles (redundant walled gardens with games artificially restricted to just one 'console').
Thirdly, Nvidia — a very very wealthy company with very competent engineers, has already shown that it's not serious enough about this anti-mining stuff to do it properly. We don't give them the benefit of the doubt. They're not undergraduate university students; they are top professionals in charge of very expensive budgets. Lucy can keep her football, thank you very much.
Fourthly, if Nvidia were more serious about this situation it would release anti-mining drivers for the Turing line.
Oxford Guy - Thursday, April 29, 2021 - link
'We don't give them the benefit of the doubt. 'Some of us also remember the GTX 970 VRAM scam.
Nvidia sold plenty of SLI systems to people based on the fiction that those cards had the same amount of VRAM as the (at the time) premium-priced 980. That's just one facet of the scam's benefit to Nvidia, which — of course — was treated to the claim that it didn't stand to benefit.
Spunjji - Friday, April 30, 2021 - link
"Firstly, Nvidia is only selling one product with anti-mining tech"Not quite right, as of May their entire range will have it.
"just as the existence of the console scam causes premium pricing across the board"
Cobblers.
Oxford Guy - Thursday, April 29, 2021 - link
'As a quick refresher, back in February with the launch of the GeForce RTX 3060 family of desktop video cards, NVIDIA implemented a novel throttling mechanism to artificially limit the Ethereum mining performance of the cards. This was done in an attempt to make the cards less palatable for miners – who have infamously been buying up cards in what is already a supply-constrained market – and thereby ensure more cards made it to gamers. Unfortunately for NVIDIA, this strategy worked for less than a month before the company accidentally released a driver without the full anti-Ethereum code in place, making it possible to mine Ethereum at full speed in some cases.'Unfortunately for Nvidia? Are you kidding?
It wasn't done to make the cards less palatable for miners. It was done as a PR move and to inflate the demand/pricing for the card. Mainly, it was done as a PR move, as demand was plenty high because of the execrable situation we're in thanks to lack of adequate competition in multiple industries.
Oxford Guy - Thursday, April 29, 2021 - link
It also should be illegal to sell multiple varieties of the 'same' product without labeling them.Restricting the functionality of one hidden variety of a product more than another is a form of bait and switch fraud.
TV companies should have been sued for their 'panel lottery' tactics, as one example of that. It's sad to see how passive consumers are in the face of things like that — and how toothless regulators are.
nucc1 - Saturday, May 1, 2021 - link
If they did that to say the 3070 which wasn't launched with these restrictions, perhaps you'd have an argument. It doesn't hold much for the 3060, even if they accidentally rolled back the limitation.Gadgety - Friday, April 30, 2021 - link
Until there's something they can deliver it all just seems like true noise in the system. " NVIDIA has also informed us..." I can imagine the number of people following these "news" has fallen drastically.Justaperson - Wednesday, June 16, 2021 - link
Well i can confirm that if you have the old version 3060 with the beta driver and put in a non lhr (mid may) 3060 when you remove the card since well its not recoginized your windows is terminated no way to salvage anything. No safeboot etc.