>"We decided to help mining and gaming community,"
I don't understand how this demand helps the gaming community. Wouldn't this drive up the crypto-motivated demand for GPUs even more and hurt the gaming community?
I don't understand how this demand helps the gaming community. Wouldn't this drive up the crypto-motivated demand for GPUs even more and hurt the gaming community?
It doesn't. This is just miners co-opting an old argument to gain sympathy.
On Tuesday, Lapsus$ modified its demand. Now, the group also wants Nvidia to commit to making its GPU drivers completely open source. If Nvidia does not comply, Lapsus$ says, the company can expect to see a new leak that would include the complete silicon, graphics, and computer chipset files for all its recent GPUs:
So, NVIDIA, the choice is yours! Either:
–Officially make current and all future drivers for all cards open source, while keeping the Verilog and chipset trade secrets... well, secret
OR
–Not make the drivers open source, making us release the entire silicon chip files so that everyone not only knows your driver's secrets, but also your most closely-guarded trade secrets for graphics and computer chipsets too!
YOU HAVE UNTIL FRIDAY, YOU DECIDE!
I seriously doubt Nvidia will cave.
But also, not everyone cares. See game modders who routinely use source code leaks to make game patches. I'm not talking about big companies that want nvidia would want to sue, but individuals and small groups, who are not a big enough target and would likely remain anonymous anyways.
If nvidia releases the drivers as source-available rather than open source that would still be incredibly useful since you can distribute patches. Their drivers are still missing basic features like fan speed control on headless machines.
I don't think you can distribute patches against proprietary source-available drivers, since modifying proprietary code is against copyright law.
It’s a polished turd, but at least it works which is more than I can say for nouveau
And yes you can distribute patches. Copyright only prevents you from distributing the modified version.
nouveau has been extremely stable for me when I used it up until last year.
Patches contain parts of the original code, so I would class them as modified versions of the original code. Also the initial modification isn't allowed either, I wasn't really referring to distribution of the patches, just creating them isn't allowed AFAIK.
OTOH, even the GPL is pretty much unenforceable these days, unless you are well funded enough to afford time consuming legal cases.
It's a clean-room engineering situation, if you've even looked at it you're legally contaminated and you're now a liability to the parent company/project's IP. And now those projects have to be hyper-aware of any contributors who might "sneak in" a bit of NVIDIA code that gets the whole project taken down.
If you need to be on the safe side, the person writing the free code should never look at the IP-protected code but instead read a summary of the findings by someone else (clean room implementation).
The only way I could see it helping is if they have all Nvidia cards and other people have some AMD lol.
It's a flimsy argument, but it's the only one I know so I figure that is what they meant.
Even "we're doing this for the miners because we oppose artificial product segmentation!" is far more sympathetic than "we're doing this for ourselves, because we like money".
(And to be clear, cyber-extortion is clearly a criminal activity.)
BUT, I think the ”helping gamers” sounds a bit hollow.
Agreed. But I don't understand how this helps the mining community, either.
Removing the LHR restriction would lead to a vast increase of the network hash rate, and consequently the difficulty would also increase, leading to lower rewards. The result would be that (1) non-LHR card owner's rewards go down significantly, and (2) LHR card owner's rewards probably wouldn't change much, perhaps even go down as well.
At least 80% of Nvidia GeForce cards sold since Summer 2021 have been LHR. That's a lot of hashing power locked up.
No, it just means you get more MH/s. It's also (probably) not cheaper to run, unless the cards actually draw less power as well.
Whether that's cost-efficient or not depends on the reward. And with hundreds of TH/s suddenly being freed from LHR, your individual reward will all but certainly go down.
First, it's about LHR only.
> We want nvidia to push an update for all 30 series firmware that remove every lhr limitations otherwise we will leak hw folder. If they remove the lhr we will forget about hw folder (it's a big folder). We both know lhr impact mining and gaming
Later, it becomes about entirely open sourcing the drivers:
> So, NVIDIA, the choice is yours! Either:
> –Officially make current and all future drivers for all cards open source, while keeping the Verilog and chipset trade secrets... well, secret
I'm not sure how this is bad.
* Yeah, yeah, I know, supply chain this and pandemic demand that, but it's really mining that's the culprit.
That's in Germany, we have some of the most expensive electricity in the world, and then the prices exploded since about 09/2021: Previously the cheapest offer was about 0.27€/kWh or maybe even 2c less if you're lucky; now we're at 0.35 to 0.45 for new contracts, depending on the region. I haven't checked the last few months (and especially not in the last week), but when I checked in early 12/2021 mining still netted some money (IIRC in the ballpark of 3 Euro/day/GPU).
If you think properly, it doesn't make sense to pay such a price just to kill some time playing games. A cheaper card would fit this purpose better.
Also I cannot blame the miners. If I am not missing something, currently a GPU mines cryptocurrency worth 50% of it cost per year (in countries with cheap electricity). I doubt you can get such percent in a bank deposit or other kind of investment.
By comparison, $1230 is over twice the MSRP of 2016's GTX 1080, which was a high end card at the time (and is roughly comparable spec-wise). It used to be that paying over $1000 for a graphics card got you the highest of the high end cards, not mid range stuff.
Obviously it's not just crypto miners raising this price. The chip shortage is real, there's been quite a bit of inflation since 2016, and PC gaming is more popular as it's ever been. But crypto miners are absolutely having an effect, and there's no real way to frame it as benefiting the average graphics card consumer.
Looks like you also missed that the chip shortage is affecting automobiles. Many articles exist that can explain better than I can about why this isn't a quickly resolved issue.
By design, proof of work requires even more resources as more resources are spent on it. One might say that it expands to consume all available supply.
Because of that, no matter how many cards Nvidia makes, crypto miners will want them all, as long as there is money to be made in crypto.
(the most prominent example is stolen electricity, but also for many miners it's a form of cash laundering. You always get less money out than you put in, but it's clean cash. In China's case they can't get money past capital controls, but you can mine at a loss and sell the bitcoins in a jurisdiction of your choice, that's worth something to them. Also, many miners are front-running exchange trades or extracting other forms of economic value.)
that essentially tells you that the price is about to go up or down, so you can make money on the movement.
https://cointelegraph.com/news/front-running-flash-bots-and-...
https://coinmarketcap.com/alexandria/glossary/miner-extracta...
Most of what you suggest doesn't benefit from having significant mining capacity yourself. (Though one thing does.)
I feel like if Nvidia could, they would have scaled up. Why wouldn't they want to meet demand?
Cryptocurrencies give NVIDIA the perfect bullshit excuse that people won't ponder too hard over, because the story of modern media is simplistic... every story must have a "good guy" and a "bad guy". It has to be dumbed down for all the idiotic plebs like us.
Cards are still selling for significantly more than MSRP, so if this was the plan they're doing a terrible job of it.
It really is multi-modal market. And demand for that node, is different from automotive woes...
There's plenty listed on sites like ebay or rakuten. It's definitely possible to buy. Else you can go buy it when it gets restocked somewhere else or go buy it at a physical store.
If you ignore the 90% to 200% mark up price from scalpers, sure.
> Else you can go buy it when it gets restocked somewhere else or go buy it at a physical store.
Ah yes, how to forget the mystic websites that have stock for more than 30 secs or the physical store that you don't need to line hours before and be in 10 telegram channels to know that.
Yesterday I installed Steam on my Linux machine and downloaded a random game that has no Linux port and played it. It worked perfectly, just like Windows. It was amazing.