GeForce RTX 3060 Ethereum Mining Restrictions Have Been Broken
videocardz.com
videocardz.com
Funny how it turned out to just be a driver thing.
[1]: https://www.theverge.com/2021/3/16/22333544/nvidia-rtx-3060-...
sort of makes one wonder how many whizz-bang hardware features get advertised that are little more than just software, but are oversold as unique physical engineering methods/techniques.
Same thing with Cisco switches for port-unlocks and Tesla cars (EAP and FSD are just software features, assuming you have HW2+, and rear heated seats are standard, just not activated unless you pay to enable it if you didn't get the cold-weather package when you ordered it).
I'm also unsure how much it really makes a difference in an electric motor compared to a combustion engine. Unless you're going to the track (or significantly breaking speed limits), you're only putting extra wear on the motors for 2-4 seconds at a time, which is all it takes to get to your 40-70 mph target speed.
https://hackaday.com/2013/11/04/manufacturer-crippled-flir-e...
Oscilloscopes are another product notorious for shipping same hardware with different jumpers/variables in the firmware.
https://tomverbeure.github.io/2020/06/27/In-the-Lab-Tektroni...
somewhat famous DS1052E 50 to 100MHz hack https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LnhXfVYWYXE
DS2072A 70 to 300MHz https://hackaday.io/project/8115-rigol-ds2072a-upgrade-to-ds...
MSO5000 70 to 350 MHz https://www.eevblog.com/forum/testgear/hacking-the-rigol-mso...
https://docs.nvidia.com/drive/drive_os_5.1.6.1L/nvvib_docs/i...
They've moved from keeping that sort of thing in EEPROM's to burnable fuses from what I understand, and I'm pretty sure what I'm aware of is pretty far behind state of the art.
If they've managed to set up the key management as well as they have and keep things hush-hushed enough to keep the nouveau folks obstructed, this seems either like an uncharacteristically careless mistake, or some seriously well executed malicious compliance from somebody.
Either way. I still find it irritating to the extreme that this type of thing only seems to happen to the detriment of users. Nvidia wins either way. Miners or gamers will buy out their cards.
My guess is this was accidentally on purpose (see also the recent shareholder lawsuit; Nvidia did win that one btw).
Source?
Never heard such a thing. Partners (MSI, ASUS, etc): absolutely. NVIDIA, I've never heard any evidence they sold directly to miners.
> My guess is this was accidentally on purpose (see also the recent shareholder lawsuit; Nvidia did win that one btw).
I think it's incredibly likely that we see this re-introduced on 3080 Ti or 3080 Super or whatever they call it which is about to be released, as well as with future generations of cards, which strongly argues against this being an "accidentally-on-purpose" thing.
People love to make up conspiracies about NVIDIA but all it takes is someone building a beta driver from a feature branch based on an old build that didn't have the mining brake yet, it's quite probable that this is just an accident. But it's NVIDIA and they're the only company people love to hate more than Apple.
People hate NVIDIA for releasing drivers that broke the mining brake, and they'll hate NVIDIA for reinstating the mining brake in the future. People get mad no matter what NVIDIA does.
I'm assuming he's referring to an RBS article which was mischaracterized by Barrons and then widely broadcast in the tech media... the RBS article looked at hashrate growth since launch and attempted to estimate the number of 30-series GPUs sold (the number they came up with was about 7% of gaming revenue). Barron's then took that number and trumpeted it as NVIDIA selling cards directly to miners when that's not what the original article said at all, they were just estimating how many cards ended up mining from any source, and it was sub-10% regardless.
But of course nobody actually went back and looked at the original article, and because it's NVIDIA everyone is completely willing to give full faith to any claims that make them look bad. Lie goes around the world before the truth has its pants on, etc.
But if there's an article I'm willing to read it.
Thank you for making me do a little leg work. Perhaps I should have done that in the first place.
https://twitter.com/dylan522p/status/1332502890104188929/pho...
I'll start to like nvidia when they provide anything remotely similar to the AMDGPU+Mesa experience on linux. Until then, hacking optimus and unstable kernel updates are the norm.
Yep. I have an old laptop with an Nvidia Quadro FX770M GPU that (hackintoshed) macOS sees as a Geforce 9600M GT and runs the included Geforce drivers quite happily on because the FX 770M so close kin with its consumer counterpart.
In fact, in a twist of irony for years the supposedly-more-stable Quadro Windows drivers had a power state bug with this card that would cause the laptop to bluescreen if the GPU tried to ramp down to an idle state. The only solution was to prevent the GPU from idling or to run a different OS with more generic drivers.
It was also before the era when PROM fuses were used to permanently disable hardware at the factory. So like, nowadays when you do something like flash Vega 56 with Vega 64 firmware, or flash 5700 with 5700XT firmware, it doesn't actually turn on any cores anymore, they're permanently disabled now. What changes is things like memory speed (Vega) or power limits (5700) that are used to artificially gimp the cards and increase the performance difference beyond the actual core count, as just disabling cores often doesn't give enough difference anymore to be marketable (Vega especially was very bottlenecked by other parts of the card other than the cores).
then there was 2003 Radeon 128MB 9500 to 9700 mod https://forum.beyond3d.com/threads/turn-your-radeon-9500-int...
One of the big differences is RAM.. the A6000 has 48GB, a 3090 only 24 (And the 3080 12). Also, the RAM in the A6000 is ECC, and of course in the consumer cards it isn't.
The A6000 also has ~10% more CUDA and Tensor cores.
So, no, it isn't just a different firmware.
When you look at the workstation cards that aren't top of the line, it's clear that they are nearly identical hardware to more mainstream consumer gaming GPUs, and the most significant hardware differences are usually smaller coolers on the workstation cards leading to lower clock speeds.
https://www.techpowerup.com/review/nvidia-geforce-rtx-3080-f...
This is the reason why DDR5 is so much faster despite using ECC effectively by default.
In the GPU space, this is why HBM2 memory doesn't really have a performance difference between ECC and non-ECC memory.
https://www.eevblog.com/forum/thermal-imaging/flir-e4-therma...
Isn't that the whole point? I was doing raytracing in the CPU in 2002 for a university project. Doesn't mean I could use it in a game.
Then you notice the asterisk and realize it's just an accelerator (usually just a few instructions with some dedicated logic) and all the NN is still in software.
With love,
USPTO
Which is a shame, because a GPU with FOSS firmware and comparable specs to the AMD/Nvidia hotness could use that software-driven flexibility to its advantage.
What does this person think "driver" means?
I.e. you couldn't update the driver yourself. That relevant "hack" seems to be the official beta/development driver without the restriction. (The other solutions don't modify anything)
Usually it's the reverse - normally drivers validate that the card's firmware is signed.
As an example, people would hack AMD Polaris card firmware memory timings for better mining performance.
To do so you needed to disable the firmware signature check in the AMD driver, and to do this you needed to disable the driver signature check in Windows.
Either way - my point is, we don't have enough details to say the original description from nvidia was wrong.
This is the same thing that has thwarted Nouveau all these years, and if you don't screw up your driver releaselike they did, it is quite effective. You could write your own firmware and load it onto the card, but you can't access the Hi-Security API's like power management, reclocking.
There's no network connection, so if the OEM's key was ever leaked, there's nothing they could do prevent anyone from writing whatever firmware they wished. Just as they can't take back the driver they done goofed releasing.
Big, display-less GPU renders frame, image is copied into VRAM of smaller GPU with a display. Smaller GPU draws image to screen.
Most of the gamer laptops do this. There's no physical link between the display and the big GPU. I believe the mobile cards enable a second DMA engine that is usually soft locked on GeForce to handle the transfer.
Midas3 (1996) https://vintage3d.org/midas3.php
PCX1 (1996) https://vintage3d.org/pcx1.php
and PCX2 (1997) https://vintage3d.org/pcx2.php
Tomb Raider running 1024x768 30FPS on a card half the cost of 3Dfx Voodoo1 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5GMesT4WKzI It could even run up to 60FPS at 640x480, the best hardware platform running Tomb Raider, and only one allowing over 30FPS.
Forum thread has more: https://linustechtips.com/topic/1021372-nvidia-said-we-could...
In a few months, when games start to get awful performance on those cards, they will claim they can't fix it because it is in the silicon and can't be patched.
But this is on everyone hoping graphic card driver authors would know anything about anything. heh.
Fantastic failure to a flawed endeavour.
[1] https://www.theverge.com/2021/3/16/22333544/nvidia-rtx-3060-...
limiting a product after a purchase, i'm pretty sure this is illegal
NVIDIA announced this limit prior to public availability and it made widespread news, meaning everyone who bought a 3060 could reasonably be expected to know about the restriction. No chance for a class action.
I’d wager I know about 1% or less of how restricted 99% of what I buy is.
There’s probably some term or condition on my water bill saying I can’t export it to Cuba or use it to moderate nuclear fission.
If you had very specific numbers in mind, you must have been looking at benchmarks, and all the benchmarks were equally locked and mining benchmarks certainly would have mentioned it.
It also appears the VBIOS on MSI's 3060 cards didn't include it either, I'm not 100% clear but I'm guessing you need both here. I've seen other discussions where people report flashing it on EVGA cards and then it increases performance to the expected levels.
I reckon this was just lip-service to consumers, and possibly their investors, that they're "doing something about those bad cryptominers that are making us loads of money".
Plus, whenever something is marketed as unbreakable, I picture guys reading it saying "Oh really? Challenge accepted!"
It'd be like buying a car and finding a clause that says if you manage to make money off of it they'll take a percentage or "brick" the hatch or something, to prevent your profitable usage. Nvidia should back the fuck off and just sell a product.
So they are not harvested silicon, but they also don't compete for fab time either.
Take a look at the data compiled by Tom's Hardware and you'll see the 3060 Ti has a 51% price premium over the 3060 on ebay. That is the "mining premium" in action. The 3060 is a bit slower on paper but it mines pretty much as well.
https://www.tomshardware.com/news/gpu-pricing-index
As such, if the mining cards mine twice as fast, they're twice as valuable to miners, and they'll pay twice as much for them. Pricing them less than gaming cards is leaving money on the table and completely unnecessary when they'll sell anyway.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atomic_bombings_of_Hiroshima_a...
That's way WAY dumber than powering a next generation global financial infrastructure.
Of course, most gamers don’t game 24x7 while their multi-GPU rack is pegged at 100% either.
That isn't to say that I think crypto is worthless, I think it has the same worth as any fiat currency. We don't spend an entire 1% of the world's energy printing and handling a tiny fraction of the world's banknotes. Crypto is orders of magnitude less energy efficient than every other form of currency on the planet. It's like if everyone started commuting to work in 18-wheeler semis.
You and GP don't get to decide what is a "legitimate" use for a GPU. All the outrage that other people want GPUs for purposes you disagree with and entitlement that only some users really deserve to have access to them is just ridiculous.
I do work for a Big-N, so the first part of the comment is true.
The license is pretty much unavoidable, even if you're using Nouveau, because the cards won't work at all unless you give it's power-management processor an Nvidia-signed binary to run, and Nvidia won't sign Free replacements for that binary.
They shifted part of their production capacity to release dedicated cards for mining that have way shorter life-cycle, because they can't be used by anyone else.
They found a way to sell more cards with a higher price tag.
It's for a long time. This is just the latest layer.
>$300k
You live in a reality that is much different than most Americans, Europeans or Asians. Reasonably, the average person can maybe get a single share, and being willing or able to blow $500 on a single share is rare. Get back down to earth, you're part of an extremely privileged group of people that fully benefits from your shares, while actual customers do not get to see returns.
Putting money in a company is not work. You are not owed anything.
But I generally agree with the rest of your comment, an investment of approximately $20000 in a single stock 5 years ago is not a modest investment for the average individual.
He is owed whatever the price someone is willing to pay for his shares which for now seems to be around $300k. He is not owed anything else though.
> Putting money in a company is not work.
He did work for that money, and he did take a risk investing it in these shares, a risk many were not willing to take. This is what he is being rewarded for now. Doesn't make him a hero or whatever of course.
A risk many _cannot_ take. For a company as large as NVidia, the risk of it collapsing is basically nil. The risk of itsInvesting at random in the stock market gives you a pretty much guaranteed growth on average.
However, many of us cannot blow 20k. We can't blow 10k. We can barely blow 1k. Once again, OP ought to have a little bit of humility and recognize his incredibly privileged position.
And dragging them down too.
Humility is a good thing Tiptoeing near snowflakes is not,
He never mistreated or harped at anyone He just said his opinion that he likes the stock. He wasn’t shitting on poor people.
"I have a modest 300k position"
When you look at these two statements in close proximity, you feel that there's perfect humility to the fortune of that position?
My income is in the "2%". I also entirely understand that that makes me in "the elite few".
> California houses cost at least 2-3 mil.
You mean "houses in a few select neighborhoods and locations", such as SF, more prestigious areas in LA. Also, they don't. Median SF house price: $1.4M. Sunnyvale, $1.6M.
Not "at least 2-3M". And certainly not in conjunction with this:
> implying that all Californian home owners are part of some elite
The median Californian home price is $700K. So no. But since you seem to imply that California is somehow defined as "places where homes cost $2-3M" then yes, absolutely. If you own a home worth $2M+ you are unequivocally "one of the elite". You may not be buying a new private jet every five years, but you are also entirely capable of a lifestyle that the VERY VAST majority of Americans have no chance of attaining.
For reference, a $3M mortgage with a substantial downpayment results in a mortgage payment of nearly $14,000/month, which with Jumbo loans requires an annual income in the region of $800K/year.
Please don't try to continue an argument that says that someone making just shy of a million dollars a year is somehow neither privileged nor elite.
This is certainly a true statement.
Of course now I’ve been pelted with downvotes and no one will remember what I actually said.
"60% of Americans could not come up with $400 for an unexpected expense".
Based on that, what proportion of Americans could afford to put even $20k into the stock market, _let alone call it a MODEST $20k_?
Good on you for investing smartly and/or getting lucky. Hopefully you use your good fortune to somehow make the world a better place, and find personal happiness in the process.
It's seemingly a non-sequitur, but I just remembered reading a short story in primary school English class years ago. It was about a distopian society where attractive, athletic folk had to wear ugly masks and weights to encumber them. Did anyone else read that?
Implying this is some frivolous expense akin to gambling your savings away at a casino or buying an expensive car is the wrong mindset. This is not entertainment; saving for your future and retirement is a life impacting matter that people need to take seriously. Yes I can't afford to and won't blow $3k on a fancy new TV. But I can afford to set aside $100 a month to put into a stock account even if I skip eating out or having a fancy phone plan.
How do you know that? People who have lots of money often did not work for it, it's inherited.
> he did take a risk investing it in these shares
People often talk about investment risk like it's a real thing, but it's not. You can either afford it or you can't.
If you can afford the loss its not risky, it's just gambling.
"I'm taking all the risk, I deserve most of the benefit" is just bullshit rich people talk to avoid the fact that the people who actually do all of the work deserve more of the upside.
The majority of the top 400 richest inherited at least 1 million.
And of the ones who did not inherit that much, often they were given that kind of money as seed money from family.
Straight up 20% of the top 400 richest were literally born in the top 400.
Knock it off with this self-made malarkey. It's just not true.
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2016/05/my-secr...
Not to mention that it would be insane for someone to pump their entire savings into the stock of an individual company.
Most homeowners do this.
As a shareholder I'd imagine you want continuing revenue, not a short bump before the market switches to AMD.
The whole point was to try and free up more 3060 supply for gamers.
They just have no credibility now so nobody believes it was to help anyone but themselves.
They lost Tesla for self driving, Waymo didn't even consider them, even though they had early advantage in AI. Comma.ai started with NVIDIA chip as well. I think Jen Huang is brilliant, but he's listening to the wrong people.
Being able to reuse the heat from mining does make it easier to break even of course, but given how competitive the sector is I doubt that it's enough to offset the costs in most places.
Cover the costs, maybe not. Offset, certainly.
Sure it does incur some PR cost as gamers are frustrated not to be able to purchase the cards, but I doubt it really damages their brand in the long term, and AFAIK AMD also faces similar issues so it's not like it massively benefits the competition.
If I were nvidia I'd be cynically very happy that miners are buying my cards in droves. What am I missing?
If they wanted gamers to have these cards they would just give out purchase invites via gaming hardware sites like Gamer's Nexus. They already make deals to supply OEMs before general retail, so all the gaming hardware being build is getting a supply either way.
In 2018, something similar happened; ETH mining became unprofitable and the result was that used Pascal cards were available for the cheap in the second hand market. The problem for NVIDIA? Turing, the successor to Pascal, released in September 2018.... and many people, instead of buying that, just bought used Pascal cards.
IIRC, NVIDIA even commented that high end sales were low compared to previous generations in an quarterly report.
Granted, the second hand market cannot be solely blamed for this, as Turing was really unattractively priced. (They shifted each tier up, so the $370 GTX 1070 was replaced with a $500 RTX 2070)
These mining cards cannot be used for gaming (this is not the first time NVIDIA releases dedicated mining cards. 2017 had P106 mining cards as well, and when people tried using them for gaming on the cheap++, NVIDIA blocked it through a driver update) and thus reduce the risk for NVIDIA in the future.
++there was some software that allowed you to render on a GPU, and output video from another GPU like the dedicated iGPU of Intel CPUs. Looking Glass, I think? But I don't fully remember. These days, this functionality is actually integrated into Windows 10.
Nope, this is price discrimination so that Bitcoin miners buy their more expensive mining card. They don't want this to be broken.
Neither me, _Understated_ or you know exactly why nvidia did what they did. What we do know, is that ultimately they answer to their shareholders and they have to show profit. Their motivations for why they do the things they do, can usually be boiled down to: "because it makes us more money".
Nvidia probably doesn't care where the graphic cards go, miners or gamers, as they still make the same amount of money.
So there's arguments for miners not being a diverse customer base that would encourage wanting to keep gamers in line. But I'm saying this without knowing any details, so I don't know
Well, you know, except for the cards that they binned specifically so they could be sold as 'mining' cards. There's no such thing, these are all 3060 GPUs, the mining cards have a slightly different firmware that wasn't even able to do the one thing it was supposed to do.
https://www.roadtovr.com/developer-reward-jailbreak-quest-2/
> Oculus Founder to Match $5,000 Reward for Anyone Who Can Jailbreak Quest 2
Nvidia gets to blame the "super tech savvy crypto hackers" while printing revenue through the roof
Nowhere near the same amount of energy. Gaming certainly doesn't use 1% of the planets energy, for example...
Moreover, socially games are probably less damaging and they’re not attempting to strip money off people in large volumes.
I agree with the criticism about bitcoin, I just find gaming industry as useless burning carbon and trying to milk money from the naive.
> I just find gaming industry as useless burning carbon and trying to milk money from the naive.
Can Video Games be divorced from the Gaming industry? Are you saying that gaming is as invalid a form of entertainment as crypto mining and speculation is? So other forms of entertainment are more valid, or is entertainment not a valid use of time?
If we assume that video gaming is not an invalid form of entertainment, how many gamers are measured compared to miners and speculators? I suspect that entertainment person-hours per joule is substantially better for video games than it is for bitcoin. In which case, if video games were a valid form of entertainment, then what we want are video games that use less energy.
If video gaming is a lesser form of entertainment, why? People said 100 years ago or thereabouts that books were a bad influence on society.
I don't quite understand what the naive part of video gaming is though. Is that in reference to gatcha?
What gamers are running multiple GPUs in a game 24/7 with 100% utilization?
I don't think it even comes close.
You can’t get a $700k/y salary for being an “OR-gate logic engineer”, but you can for being an “AI engineer”.
I have no source at hand.
I’m also not sure what to think of it.
I personally think hardware identifiers are a good approach. NVIDIA has GeForce Experience, they have access to hardware identifiers and telemetry that will let them see who's actually gaming. This approach works very well for games like Overwatch, where hardware bans are essentially "game over" and you now have to get a new motherboard, CPU, GPU, clean OS install, and new IP address in order to hack again, it is fairly painful and slows down hackers significantly after a ban wave.
(Or something like requiring a unique driver's license, one per person.)
All of the other approaches are trivially gameable. A queue? Scalpers will register 1000 accounts and take all the queue spots. A lottery? Scalpers will register 1000 accounts and win all the lottery cards. etc etc. There will always be retailers if you do not currently have a card or are morally opposed to GFE.
Rather than coming up with a billion restrictions for every new way people invent to waste resources, just charge people for resource usage.
Careful here. The 'renewables are cheaper' narrative is sacred.
Crypto mining on its own is not bad or evil. Only ruining our environment is bad.
How this would work in practice is you charge it at power generation. If the power company uses coal as a power source, they are hit with a carbon tax which gets passed on to the customers. Then every power company that doesn't use dirty sources has cheaper prices and all customers move over.
In the mean time you can use all profits from a carbon tax to discount other taxes so the end user pays no extra but they are constantly pushed to cleaner sources. This has been tested in the real world and it works very well.
I imagine it has something to do with how Etherum is mostly integer math and boolean operations for hashing, while gaming workloads tend to be floating point, but I'm just guessing.
Another factor in the background: the pandemic has caused a worldwide fab capacity shortage. Lots of manufacturers are running around with their hair on fire trying to book fab slots. Even car production is being held up due to IC shortages.
https://www.extremetech.com/computing/320511-samsungs-austin...
Turns out maybe that setting up your factory in a libertarian tax haven that went out of its way to prevent grid interconnects that would have allowed power delivery to continue, in order to forego enforcement of federal regulations that would have prevented these outages in the first place, might not have been such a great idea.
But muh Texas, "did you know we have the right to secede!?" So cool! /s
AMD does the same thing with Radeon/FirePro.
I don't expect Nvidia to give up on that. And to be honest, for me personally, it is a good thing. I don't mine and I don't CAD, having GPUs unavailable for the former and overpriced for the latter results in more affordable prices for myself.
The earliest likely merge date is Q1 2022. The only exception is if the situation is urgent (miners attacking, or nicehash having a dangerously high percentage of hash) - in this situation the merge itself could be done in a month I think.
I think it's largely political, getting stake pool nodes and people using ETH2. There will likely be ETH1 and ETH2 running side by side for some time. ETH1 can be burned to get ETH2, so there's a one-way transition (though I'm not sure if this story is complete yet, that's the plan anyway).
Nvidia seemed to be doing the right thing at first, taking the concerns of their most enthusiastic customers seriously and doing something about it. Given how badly the company usually treats their customers, it seemed like a nice gesture.
Then the Internet trolls came out and accused the company of just giving the issue lip service, since it was obviously just a software fix, it wouldn't really stop the big crypto farms from using the cards. Nvidia is evil, as per normal.
Then the company responds with a lie, that it's actually a hardware implementation. No one believed it, but that's their story. Nvidia is trying to do the right thing.
Then all the gamers - most of whom aren't even in the market for a RTX 3060 - start flipping out about how the resale of the cards is going to be lower because they're all nerfed. So by charging full price for the card anyways, Nvidia is actually ripping them off!! Nvidia is evil again.
Then this screwups happens and everyone now is screeching about how they knew it all along and Nvidia is actually lying about EVERYTHING!! Maybe they're creating artificial shortages in the first place! It's all a conspiracy man!!
I don't think I've ever seen an reasonable idea like this go tits up so fast. Remember when Netflix announced Quickster and it bit them in the ass so hard they had to cancel the whole spinoff? This is what this reminds me of: Good intentions badly implemented.
3dfx was a chipset vendor - whether or not they fab their own chips shouldn't matter all-that-much: it's who makes and sells the boards that counts. The Voodoo1 and early Voodoo2 cards were made, packaged, and sold by hardware partners like Creative, Diamond, etc - but with the Voodoo3 and later SKUs of the Voodoo2, 3dfx did it all by themselves, so why would the miffed Creative Labs and Diamond lend their sales channel expertise to 3dfx? PC OEMs like Dell, HP, etc also probably had deals with Creative for their Sound Blaster, and it wouldn't surprise me if Creative politely asked them to not buy 3dfx-made boards in exchange for a sweet discount on Sound Blaster cards...
Fun to read discussion here: https://m.slashdot.org/story/7743
As far as I can tell the reason they don't raise prices is that the PR hit they'd take from all the gamers hating them for it would be a bigger deal than the additional revenue.
If eBay prevented scalping and e-commerce created bot protections, demand would stop being absurd.
Nvidia stopped selling cards on their site because they couldn't figure out how to prevent bots from buying them all. Not to mention Nvidia is selling cards directly to large miners by the pallet load.
Ebay is not going to go away just because it hurts gamers' fee-fees. Nor should it. And I say this as someone who is generally opposed to mining and generally upset with 30-series availability. Demanding that ebay shut down is both a ludicrous over-reaction and will not solve anything anyway.
You're literally blaming the market for providing a clearing-price. If you want to reduce demand for gaming cards, forcing miners into their own product segment is the most plausible way to do that, then the clearing-price falls.
I don't see it as bizarre to be frustrated that one's hobby is being priced out of reach by what amounts to an environmentally-damaging pyramid scheme.
A GPU is a GPU, why is it's environmental impact fine if it's 31 million people pretending to be a cowboy in RDR2 but bad if it's being used for financial transactions.
You can't really say the same for video games. To reduce the carbon footprint of a user playing RDR2, you either need newer more energy efficient hardware, or you need to alter the experience the game provides to make it less computationally expensive.
You can claim that as evidence after Ethereum has actually moved to proof-of-stake and operated in that mode for a significant length of time without any notable vulnerabilities. Proof-of-stake has some known drawbacks compared to proof-of-work; in particular, at least in naïve implementations, there is nothing to prevent a malicious party from staking the same coins in multiple chains (forks) simultaneously, a flaw which proof-of-work systems are specifically designed to avoid by making the proof depend on each chain's history. One assumes that the Ethereum developers came up with some sort of mitigation for that issue, among others, but it has yet to see real-world testing with significant funds at risk should it fail.
Where trust is feasible transactions can be settled cheaply in separate records and not on the blockchain itself. The Lightning network is one such protocol; support for inter-account transfers on the same exchange is another. However, it's good that the trustless option exists for the cases where trust would not be justified.
Or add extra tax on those who play video games to cover the carbon impact or ban high powered GPUs so they can't even cause that impact anyway, keep all gaming at low end mobile device processor levels.
It's all still code running over the same circuits whether it's being used to verify crypto or let people pretend to be a cowboy. If crypto is taxed more for it's impact then so should video games and maybe things like Marvel movies for the impact of their CGI rendering.
or does the argument of environmental impact go out of the window when its Rockstar and Disney making money from running processors full blast rather than some nobody getting rich from crypto.
The crypto mining market has way more money to burn because they're making it back over time via mining, which means that unless there's enough supply for both markets the gaming market gets (almost) nothing until the crypto mining market has bought all the cards they want.
I have no idea what the solution to this problem is, and I don't think poorly designed driver restrictions is it. But it is an actual problem.
Are there any historical examples of similar situations?
The challenge is at least two fold in my opinion, first of all semi conductor fabrication capacity is stretched right now and additional capacity has a significant capital requirement. Secondly it's probably not clear if crypto demand will stick around long enough to warrant additional capacity, the bottom has fallen out of it before.
Cryptocurrency miners are driving up the prices of GPUs. NVIDIA wants to make sure that they have stock available for their regular customers, because that is where the long-term profit comes from. Ramping up production is not feasible on the short time scale that cryptocurrencies have been around, nor is it known whether cryptocurrencies will be around for long enough to recover such an investment.
TL;DR: Cryptocurrency miners are messing up the long-term GPU market, and NVIDIA is trying to maintain that market.
There are other ideas too, higher prices on raw hardware but cash-back incentives if bought with games or gaming hardware.
Now everyone hates them. AMD couldn't have paid for such marketing. AMD gives everyone ECC support, unlocked cards. They're (currently) the anti Intel/Nvidia, and the market darling.
Bitcoin has been around since 2010. They've had plenty of time to realize this was coming. Even the thickest person could've spotted this wave coming in 2013, in addition to the continued rise of computer and console gaming.
What a lot of people seem to think: Used up cards could end up flooding the market while miners migrate to the newest cards, cutting into NVIDIAs profit or NVIDIA wants to make more money by selling pure mining cards that can't be reused for anything else.
And what about gamers? Well... they can buy used previous gen cards from miners.
> Well... they can buy used previous gen cards from miners.
Yeah, last gen cards, which would ruin any lead NVIDIA has over its competition. Going by the steam hardware survey NVIDIA currently owns the PC market, that wont last if they whole inventory is bought up by crypto miners and might lead to serious long term consequences if gamers and engine developers shift their focus to AMD and Intel.
Maybe I'm old and cynical but does anyone actually think this was an error on NVIDIA part? Their goal is to sell as much GPU as they can, their shareholders wouldn't want it any other way. My opinion is it was a convenient mistake that will sell a lot more cards.
Yes. And I assume we'll see the mining brake return on 3080 Ti / 3080 Super and on 4000 series cards as well.
This looks very much to me like someone built a feature branch on an old version that didn't have the mining brake installed, and then pushed the branch somewhere they shouldn't. I see no reason to doubt that - classic case of Hanlon's Razor in action:
"never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity".
> Their goal is to sell as much GPU as they can, their shareholders wouldn't want it any other way.
Segmenting miners to a different, higher-priced segment makes them more money. You're selling two cards instead of one, on top of increasing your effective production capacity (because the mining cards are on a different, older node that is not bottlenecked as badly).
This of course requires vendors to also play with this scheme, which I'm not sure NVIDIA has the clout to ensure that point-of-sale people can enforce this.
And a good thing too.
And multi-stream video encoding while we are at it.
I thought there were no CUDA limits on the RTX 3070/3080/3090 cards?
I've got a 3080 from launch and have not noticed any artificial caps or performance issues when doing CUDA-related things.
https://www.techpowerup.com/forums/threads/nerfed-fp64-perfo...
There always seems to be a persistent optimism for the effectiveness of this kind of thing. For example how long DRM or anti-piracy methods on games will be effective for.
If that were truly the case I wouldn't have to deal with multiple fuck ups caused by Nvidia releasing drivers with improper signing (windows seems fine with it, but virtualbox runs into issues with it due to hardening checks.)
A gamer doesn't need mathematical perfection. 99% of gamers wouldn't care if a card game rendered something slightly off, a pixel or two out of place on a 8k screen. A slight mathematical error wouldn't be noticed. But that same math error would destroy any mining efforts. So I propose that, rather than feeble attempts at software-based DRM, that Nvidea actually break the cards. Add in a tiny math error that gamers won't care about but that will render the cards useless for anything requiring exact calculation.
This would of course be very difficult to design.
Then there was the traditional rigged demo solution; one generation of cards behaved differently when the program running was named QUAKE.EXE. That is now almost standard, since part of the reason NVIDIA driver downloads are so large is a huge pack of compatibility tweaks for specific games.
Note that sometimes games do need absolutely exact results, or at the very least reproducible results. For instance sometimes you want to use something like `glDepthFunc(GL_LEQUAL)` which will only accept a fragment if its depth is equal to the depth buffer's value. A small fudging here would cause potentially large visual issues.
I'm not saying it's impossible but I expect that it would create a lot of headache as random, potentially unmaintained games would start glitching here and there.