It's going to take days for mining operations to reverse-engineer the driver and undo this. So commercial operations won't be affected at all.
Worse, their detection isn't going to be 100% perfect. What if After Effects does something that looks "kind of" like mining. Is it just going to be crippled? What will nvidia do then? Suggest I buy a Quadro for AE support?
This will only penalise average users.
How?
Currently, average users can't get their hands on any of these cards because they're being bought in bulk by crypto miners. As soon as mining becomes unprofitable, the market will be flooded with cards that have been run 24/7 for months or years, which isn't a recipe for a good experience.
The average user can only benefit from getting access to these cards again. nVidia knows they can't afford to burn goodwill with their customers, whom they depend on to buy card upgrades every few years.
> Worse, their detection isn't going to be 100% perfect. What if After Effects does something that looks "kind of" like mining. Is it just going to be crippled? What will nvidia do then?
nVidia isn't a resource-limited startup. They have a lot of smart people. They're obviously going to test the firmware against common workloads.
Regardless, don't buy a card unless you know it does what you want it to do. These cards are all mining-limited from day 1, so it's not like the performance will regress suddenly.
They can only test against pre-existing software. If they start penalizing uncommon workloads, this kills innovation in many areas, videogames included.
In one of my projects I'm using GPGPUs for complicated optimizations in CAM/CAE. I don't use any libraries/frameworks. From nVidia's point of views, my compute shaders are extremely uncommon workload. Unwanted too, because I skipped CUDA and their vendor lock-in.
I'm not too worried about that. Nvidia has track record of releasing driver updates to address issues in end-user applications. If a legitimate application got accidentally flagged, people will report it and nvidia will whitelist them.
That approach doesn’t work in general. Look at “Manage 3D settings / Program settings” in nVidia’s control panel. They only have presets for very popular software like Adobe After Effects or Premiere, benchmarks like 3D mark, or AAA videogames.
If you're in the market for a new card and you have the option of a powerful, purpose-built card that works out of the box or one that needs endless tweaking, few people would choose the more complex option. Especially if it means every new driver that gets released is going to require days to make work properly.
Constant GPU driver updates are the norm for gaming GPUs because GPU drivers include a huge pile of workarounds for buggy games, and there are new buggy games hitting the market all the time. But if you just want to run a specific straightforward GPGPU task like a miner, you only need to get one driver version properly cracked to unlock full performance, and keep using that until the hardware is no longer profitable to mine with.
And it seems pretty likely that a countermeasure bolted on to the drivers this late in the process will be defeated fairly quickly, and miners will go on a second shopping spree after clearing out the stock of the new purpose-built mining cards. (Assuming those even ship before the 3060 drivers get cracked.)
Miners don't care about driver updates so it's really a one-off, not endless, once it's running they don't have to touch it.
This just seems like a feeble gesture at appeasing gamers. What's interesting is that these "mining-crippling" changes will only apply to the 3060 GPU, not the rest of the RTX 3000 series. If it was a legitimate gesture, then Nvidia would've made it universally applicable.
Color me cynical, but this seems like a strong gesture at increasing margins on GPU computing by upselling using cryptocurrency and gamers as PR pawns/scapegoats
if Nvidia is selling more cards than they can produce/distribute at desired target prices they should produce more cards and improve their distribution networks..
Maybe it will offset the days it takes for a graphics card to pay itself by a few weeks? (e.g. previously RTX 3070 took x weeks to pay itself by mining 24/7, maybe it will change to x + 2 weeks?)
I wish AMD had a working product to kick their teeth in...
Vendors and demand have effectively driven prices to an insane amount, and you just can't get them, unfortunately. Short of AMD doing something like Nvidia is doing here, I doubt we'll see them on store shelves any time soon.
[0] https://www.mindfactory.de/Hardware/Grafikkarten+(VGA)/Radeo... [1] https://www.alternate.de/Grafikkarten/Big-Navi
Edit: 1100$ actually.
RX 5700 will hit 55mhs and the RX6K series will do ~68mhs, but the cost of the 5700 is typically like half that of a 6800.
There's a reason it's easier to find the new AMD stuff in stock than nvidia stuff, they've got a terrible mining roi.