Great news everybody! RTX 30 series hashing limiter partially defeated!

Great news?
I consider any defeat of this abhorrent, purposefull limitation of a GPU's function to be great news. This feature cannot and should not be normalized or it will only lead to even worse restrictions in future generations the moment they smell money and figure the public will accept it. Hopefully the other 30% can be defeated ASAP .
 
I consider any defeat of this abhorrent, purposefull limitation of a GPU's function to be great news. This feature cannot and should not be normalized or it will only lead to even worse restrictions in future generations the moment they smell money and figure the public will accept it. Hopefully the other 30% can be defeated ASAP .
QFT. I'm not a miner, but I want my cards unrestricted by artificial "popular demand" nerfs. This was a blatant test case to see how people react to artificial limits. Cheer it on and you're going to see lots of video card dlc in the future.
 
I consider any defeat of this abhorrent, purposefull limitation of a GPU's function to be great news. This feature cannot and should not be normalized or it will only lead to even worse restrictions in future generations the moment they smell money and figure the public will accept it. Hopefully the other 30% can be defeated ASAP .
Ordinarily I would agree, but the PC gaming market can't survive without video cards, and the cards just aren't worth nearly as much to gamers as they are to miners.
 
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Ordinarily I would agree, but the PC gaming market can't survive without video cards, and the cards just aren't worth nearly as much to gamers as they are to miners.

plenty of gaming to be had on APUs. Look at the one going into the steam deck - that’s basically a low end AM5 APU. Double, triple its capabilities and things start to look okay for higher resolutions and frame rates.

pc gaming will be fine. If you want 4k60fps you’ll just buy the desktop version of the Xbox series X processor instead of a $3000gpu. Or just get an Xbox.
 
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Ordinarily I would agree, but the PC gaming market can't survive without video cards, and the cards just aren't worth nearly as much to gamers as they are to miners.

QFT! I'm worried how it will start look like in 4-5 years when indie PC game developers have to start closing doors, this kind of pricing won't be sustainable to the PC gaming market especially as this problem doesn't exist in the console market. Will see how those pro-miners in this thread will respond then. Either the games will have to be made more backwards compatible which slows down the progress in graphics development which will make consoles more attractive in the long run or the prices will have to come down one way or another. Any method is welcome as long as it makes pc gamers also be able to afford them.

I'm a PC gamer and hardware enthusiast but I have zero interest in mining myself and even for me the pricing is currently way above I consider reasonable to pay, I wonder how it looks like for average joe then or these kids whose parents sponsors their purchase, if the choice is between a considerably more cheap console or outrageously priced PC then often the choice will be the former which is one less customer for the PC game developers.
 
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RPGWiZaRD Plenty of indie games that don’t require anything beyond what an APU can handle. Especially as performance improvements come with next generation parts.

maybe high end AAA games at 4k120 will be out of reach for a lot of PC gamers, but the “hardware enthusiast” segment that a lot of us [H]ere used to be a part of just doesn’t exist anymore. There’s no room for anyone with a reasonable budget in high end PC gaming anymore.
 
I consider any defeat of this abhorrent, purposefull limitation of a GPU's function to be great news. This feature cannot and should not be normalized or it will only lead to even worse restrictions in future generations the moment they smell money and figure the public will accept it. Hopefully the other 30% can be defeated ASAP .
Absolutely incorrect - better to have discreet gaming and mining lines. Let the miners pay triple or quadruple the gaming card price and let them finance gaming. There is a silver lining, though. The faster miners defeat the limiters now, the more time NVidia has to bake in the fixes for the 4k series. Maybe they can cook up something truly unbreakable by next year.
 
If MLID is right, and I trust them on this, most AIB's aren't bothering to make the LHR models.
Didn't nVidia say they weren't going to make non-LHR silicon going forward? (I can't remember.)
 
RPGWiZaRD Plenty of indie games that don’t require anything beyond what an APU can handle. Especially as performance improvements come with next generation parts.

maybe high end AAA games at 4k120 will be out of reach for a lot of PC gamers, but the “hardware enthusiast” segment that a lot of us [H]ere used to be a part of just doesn’t exist anymore. There’s no room for anyone with a reasonable budget in high end PC gaming anymore.

I think you're missing the point, the point is miners have a higher threshold they wanna spend as long as they can make it profitable, gamers pay for entertainment value and that doesn't come back as profit and thus the threshold is lower and that's why they drive up the prices so much. If we would all sit tight and NOT buy a card the prices would come down quickly as per demand and supply rules (which happened before mining became a thing) but as long as it can be made profitable with mining due to human nature of greed, there will be a reason to spend it and this is not good for the PC gaming community and I don't see why you have to be such a snob about it whether or not you're the guy that are like "who cares as long as I have money in the bank" guy.

I'm not personally even interested in 4K either, I'm only looking for to jump into 1440p at 144 - 180Hz or so territory, but this today roughly requires a RTX 3060 Ti / 3070 lvl of card to be worth it and I cannot get that for $500~550 I'm willing to spend, I have progressively raised my spending cap as I've become older and accepted natural inflation over time etc, started off at ~$250 being a big deal back in the GeForce 4 Ti days and now last card I bought and still use is a 1070 Ti I got for a sales price of $400 around black friday, today around $500 or little above would be my cap to get a monitor capable of 1440p 144 ~ 180Hz or thereabouts running smoothly most of the time but due to the circumstances of miners driving up the prices it looks like I'm about to wait a long time before an option becomes available. Even at 1440p 144Hz+ it's getting ridiculously expensive these days (~$900 for the GPU alone)
 
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Didn't nVidia say they weren't going to make non-LHR silicon going forward? (I can't remember.)

I haven't seen that, but I've only been following this loosely. They use the same dies, (some people say they're "bad" or salvaged dies) I'm sure there's just a secondary control chip that scans for certain code and forces the RAM to run at half clock or half shut off, something like that. The cost to tape out a different GPU would be huge, with no real return on investment.
 
I haven't seen that, but I've only been following this loosely. They use the same dies, (some people say they're "bad" or salvaged dies) I'm sure there's just a secondary control chip that scans for certain code and forces the RAM to run at half clock or half shut off, something like that. The cost to tape out a different GPU would be huge, with no real return on investment.
This is a software level restriction. There are no real hardware level differences. Nvidia has said that themselves. So no, any theory the LHR cards are mechanically Inferior to the non LHR cards is nonsense.

And what points to that being true, is that nvidia “accidentally” released the non lhr version of a driver months ago for a LHR card, and the card performed as it should with no limitation. Also that’s how this workaround in the original article is being done, all through software.
 
Wow I didn’t realize saying “this stuff is getting so expensive, I don’t see how anyone with a reasonable budget can afford it” makes me a snob.

I’ve been priced out of high end, actually even mid-range PC gaming as a hobby. It’s too expensive.

If the market doesn’t recover and GPUs just get so expensive that they stop being a component developers can realistically target then PC gaming will shift. It won’t look like it does right now. Games might be less graphically intense, but they’ll still be around. A whole ton of indie games right now run fine on iGPU hardware, so that’s probably not going to change. Discrete GPUs will just be less common as time goes on, unless there’s a sudden major downturn in prices.
 
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This is a software level restriction. There are no real hardware level differences. Nvidia has said that themselves. So no, any theory the LHR cards are mechanically Inferior to the non LHR cards is nonsense.

And what points to that being true, is that nvidia “accidentally” released the non lhr version of a driver months ago for a LHR card, and the card performed as it should with no limitation. Also that’s how this workaround in the original article is being done, all through software.
I thought they were going to add hardware fuses (cringe) to lock down the firmware.
 
I thought they were going to add hardware fuses (cringe) to lock down the firmware.

There is supposebly hardware that does the governing. But it's still controlled by software at the driver level.

If a broken (or "broken") driver disabled it, there must be other software-level ways to bypass it.
 
If the market doesn’t recover and GPUs just get so expensive that they stop being a component developers can realistically target then PC gaming will shift. It won’t look like it does right now. Games might be less graphically intense, but they’ll still be around. A whole ton of indie games right now run fine on iGPU hardware, so that’s probably not going to change. Discrete GPUs will just be less common as time goes on, unless there’s a sudden major downturn in prices.

So why should we as PC gamers accept a lower standard than what's possible? Don't tell me it wasn't exciting in the past to have more significant grapical progresses every 1-2 years or so instead of maybe every 5 years or so now and PC leading the pack very clearly in the past. Yes it won't get to those around year 1995 - 2005 levels of progression even if GPUs were very competitively priced at say 450 - $550 range for a 1440p high refresh rate gaming capable GPU at triple AAA titles due to many factors but increase in complexity/cost to bring up a more capable GPU in the ever more so challenging environment) but maybe we're looking at 4 instead of 5 years when the pricing impact is taken into account, every bit counts. Before it was possible to get upgrade every generation fairly cheap, now you'll have to skip 1 or even 2 generations to get a worthy midrange card replacement. It may come a day still when consoles lead the development at launch and PC's will eventually catch up in one year later as games aren't worth pushing primarily for the PC. Yes this won't happen over night but it doesn't mean we should just sit back and watch it slowly occuring.

Idk, I just have a hard time why PC gamers should just sit back and let this all play along and just hope the market recovers by itself instead of demand, as a customer, for change which LHR did address by lowering the profitability for miners in order to bring the treshold of interst down more closer to what gamers are willing to spend for their hobbies.

Look I get it we have different way of looking at life, you are probably more capitalistic-minded than I personally am but at least we should be able to see a common ground to the future of PC gaming at which we should be concerned how this prolonged sudden spike in pricing may have, it's a bit like the current gen Xbox and Playstation consoles currently jumped to a MSRP of $999.
 
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QFT. I'm not a miner, but I want my cards unrestricted by artificial "popular demand" nerfs. This was a blatant test case to see how people react to artificial limits. Cheer it on and you're going to see lots of video card dlc in the future.
What if the card naturally just was a shitty tool to use for mining? Would you be upset that that the card sucks as a mining card?
 
What if the card naturally just was a shitty tool to use for mining? Would you be upset that that the card sucks as a mining card?
That's an entirely different scenario. Of course not. This is 100% artificial though.
 
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Let "AAA" gaming die. Eye candy never = good anyway. We got to a point where indies could make great looking games years back already.
Let developers focus on gameplay and adjusting their eye candy run expectations to APUs.
Then when the bottom drops out on crypto when Governments decide to kill it all, and AI is performed completely by custom low cost AI chips. The GPU companies will have gotten exactly what they deserve.

Up side is... we probably get even more decent indie games. I can't even name the last "AAA" title that held my attention longer then the handful of hours it took me to walk though the game once. Heck to be honest I think I can name the "AAA" titles I actually finished in the last 6 or 7 years on one hand. Most can't hold my attention even that long.
 
To those gamers looking for a card... if you can't beat 'em - join 'em! Might as well pay extra for the card you want and mine with it while you are not gaming, to recoup the cost. GPU crypto mining not going away anytime soon.
 
So why should we as PC gamers accept a lower standard than what's possible?

You seem to be arguing something completely different from what I'm saying. The prices have been going up and they’re past the point most will (or even can) pay. It's literally not an option for a lot of gamers. The market of PC gamers who will actually buy a video card these days is smaller as a result. But the cards still sell in volume because people have other uses for them. So the gaming use for the cards becomes more and more niche even as sales increase and everyone is wasting electricity and talking about ROI on their RTX 3090s.

It's nice to think everyone has the option, but a lot of us have been priced right out of the hobby. If someone asked me for advice building even a low end gaming PC right now I'd just tell them to buy an Xbox Series S and call it a day. If you can't play it on a desktop or laptop you already have, it's just not worth the cost.

Idk, I just have a hard time why PC gamers should just sit back and let this all play along and just hope the market recovers by itself instead of demand, as a customer, for change which LHR did address by lowering the profitability for miners in order to bring the treshold of interst down more closer to what gamers are willing to spend for their hobbies.

So how do you do that? Don't buy one until the prices are lower? Isn't that "sitting back and letting this play along" as you've said?

And unless you really want to pay $900 for a video card to get that 1440p, 144+ fps gaming that you've said you want, aren't you just "sitting back and letting this play along" too? Just hoping the market recovers by itself so you can spend what you want to spend vs. what the market price is right now?

Look I get it we have different way of looking at life, you are probably more capitalistic-minded than I personally am but at least we should be able to see a common ground to the future of PC gaming at which we should be concerned how this prolonged sudden spike in pricing may have, it's a bit like the current gen Xbox and Playstation consoles currently jumped to a MSRP of $999.

I have no idea what you're on about with "capitalistic".

I’m assuming you missed an “if” in there. Yes, it’s exactly like if prices had doubled in the past 7 years or so. Because that’s what happened. Discrete GPU pricing has been creeping up for the past few generations, and no one really complained. And here we are today, where mainstream cards (previously the "under $300" segment) regularly sell for $600+ and people think it's a good deal just because it's in stock. Apparently price is only a problem when "scalpers" are involved?

I'm not personally concerned about it, though. PC Gaming to me isn't chasing higher resolutions and framerates. A game running at 1080p/60 or 1440p/120 is... still the same game. I play games on my PC because that's where all the unique and interesting stuff is. Things like Loop Hero or Among Us. Stardew Valley, Into the Breach... Undertale? These are not games that require a high end graphics card. They run on Intel integrated graphics. Intel. Like I said in my original post that you quoted - there's a ton of really good indie games that play on just about anything, and those won't be going away. That market will probably just get bigger.
 
If nvidia/amd can clear 40-50% at msrp, they will increase production untill the market is saturated.

I think mining is a scam, but I think people should be free to fall for whatever scam they believe in.

Production increases are not an overnight thing, but if the demand for mining gpus stays around, there is no reason to intentionally constrain the market. Nvidia and AMD would rather sell a ton of cards at msrp than a few at scalped prices. They get more of the pie with volume sales.
 
There is supposebly hardware that does the governing. But it's still controlled by software at the driver level.

If a broken (or "broken") driver disabled it, there must be other software-level ways to bypass it.
Sure, but in the future it may not be possible to circumvent with a trivial driver hack. We'll just have to wait to see what they do.

In the meantime, enjoy the show. 🍿
 
Let "AAA" gaming die. Eye candy never = good anyway. We got to a point where indies could make great looking games years back already.
Let developers focus on gameplay and adjusting their eye candy run expectations to APUs.
Exactly. Since the hardware has been around for high-end graphics, it seems that is all that the game developers have focused on. There are plenty of older games that have great gameplay mechanics, and even though they are ugly by today's standards, still are enjoyable to play.

If graphics processing for ultra-realistic 4k/8k/whatever comes next is out of the price range for the majority of gamers, game developers will adjust, and go back to making new games with more interesting gameplay in order to sell. It certainly won't be the end of PC gaming, though it might spell the end of "PC Gaming" that is nothing more than enhanced console ports.
 
i think this doesn't matter much because people were probably still buying them to mine with anyway knowing something like this would happen.
 
i think this doesn't matter much because people were probably still buying them to mine with anyway knowing something like this would happen.
LHR has essentially been a nonfactor the entire time, since one could just mine alts and autoconvert to ETH/BTC, or rent hashpower to a brokerage service like nicehash which pays in BTC and accomplishes similar.

https://whattomine.com/gpus?cost=0.0

The only thing LHR has done is suppressed scalper margins slightly versus non-LHR SKUs.
 
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Im pretty sure we all knew this was going to happen anyhow. Its not going to change prices any but yay for whoever its supposed to be benefitting, i guess?

Wake me when its worth my time and effort to drag my tired carcass to microcenter and buy that reasonably priced 3080 or 6800xt.
 
Absolutely incorrect - better to have discreet gaming and mining lines. Let the miners pay triple or quadruple the gaming card price and let them finance gaming. There is a silver lining, though. The faster miners defeat the limiters now, the more time NVidia has to bake in the fixes for the 4k series. Maybe they can cook up something truly unbreakable by next year.

I'm not sure if this is shortsighted or just unaware of what happens if the policy follows to its conclusion. This isn't an issue of discrete "mining lines". Nvidia did that properly last generation when they basically sold cut down cards for compute without video output and missing other features, mostly from batches that wouldn't pass QC for the wide range of general usage. However, the issue here is the shortage of fabs for these chips, not what "line" they're put into. What you describe is horrible for users when you start cutting out features that used to be considered value-added for a complex - and stupidly expensive increase every couple generations as the 1080 Ti was the obscene high end and was $700-ish MSRP - GPU. Would you like a future where you to have a separate gaming GPU, and a compute GPU, and a media watching GPU, a video encoding/decoding GPU, and a raytracing GPU, and a streaming GPU , and a mining GPU etc... all to get the same general functionality that you used to get from a single card today? The GPU manufacturers would love that kind of exploitation if they thought they could get away with it!

LHR is setting a precedent of TAKING AWAY a feature from consumer GPUs, slamming on artificial limitations, and that cannot be allowed to stand. There are other potential issues with market segmentation on things like the professional GPUs, but at least those were often crafted for specific features like 64bit and double precision FP that were actually not being used in general hardware, much less on general workloads. However, even in this regard there has been some progress the right direction in recent years whereas users can choose either gaming or development/professional driver kits depending on their need, no matter their hardware configuration - we don't need to do anything that encourages companies to create more needless segmentation and restriction that will only harm the consumer in the long run if it appears the market will bear doing so.

Lets not shoot ourselves in the foot and plead companies to so something disastrous in the long term, that won't even really fix the short term problem, out of frustration!
 
I'm not sure if this is shortsighted or just unaware of what happens if the policy follows to its conclusion. This isn't an issue of discrete "mining lines". Nvidia did that properly last generation when they basically sold cut down cards for compute without video output and missing other features, mostly from batches that wouldn't pass QC for the wide range of general usage. However, the issue here is the shortage of fabs for these chips, not what "line" they're put into. What you describe is horrible for users when you start cutting out features that used to be considered value-added for a complex - and stupidly expensive increase every couple generations as the 1080 Ti was the obscene high end and was $700-ish MSRP - GPU. Would you like a future where you to have a separate gaming GPU, and a compute GPU, and a media watching GPU, a video encoding/decoding GPU, and a raytracing GPU, and a streaming GPU , and a mining GPU etc... all to get the same general functionality that you used to get from a single card today? The GPU manufacturers would love that kind of exploitation if they thought they could get away with it!

LHR is setting a precedent of TAKING AWAY a feature from consumer GPUs, slamming on artificial limitations, and that cannot be allowed to stand. There are other potential issues with market segmentation on things like the professional GPUs, but at least those were often crafted for specific features like 64bit and double precision FP that were actually not being used in general hardware, much less on general workloads. However, even in this regard there has been some progress the right direction in recent years whereas users can choose either gaming or development/professional driver kits depending on their need, no matter their hardware configuration - we don't need to do anything that encourages companies to create more needless segmentation and restriction that will only harm the consumer in the long run if it appears the market will bear doing so.

Lets not shoot ourselves in the foot and plead companies to so something disastrous in the long term, that won't even really fix the short term problem, out of frustration!
You’re describing exactly what they SHOULD do in the face of immense demand and constrained production.

I am both a gamer and a NVIDIA stock holder. Given miners will buy an unlimited number of cards since they profit off of them, gamers are screwed no matter what if the cards are general use. In this case, since me as a gamer is out of luck, me as a NVIDIA stock holder wants NVIDIA charging around $3500 per card so I can get a larger benefit from my stock.

if, at $3500 per mining card, demand ebbs enough that there is room at the fab for extra product, that leaves Nvidia some room to make LHR cards at $1200 and maximize profit from the gamers.

if the market for media watching GPUs grows enough to squeeze out miners and gamers, then I want them to start making high priced media cards.

You’ll know if they are charging the right price if there are typically 1 or 2 cards in stock. Any more than than and they should lower the price. Any less than that, they should either make a new line to meet the new market segment, or just raise prices.
 
Good. This was implemented so poorly anyway. Clearly nvidia was full of crap with this being impossible to bypass and it being hard coded in the silicon.

What would have been good - LHR variants are released to be CHEAPER than the regular counterparts, yes even cheaper than msrp for founders since FE cards for some inexplicable reason didn't get the LHR treatment. Miners stick to FE and full priced AIB cards.

What we got - AIBs just swap their lineup to be LHR without price reduction to reflect the decrease in functionality. No option to buy non LHR anymore (outside of 3090s) for AIBs. The FE cards are still able to mine AND are the cheapest cards around, meaning these are now extra desirable to miners.
 
QFT. I'm not a miner, but I want my cards unrestricted by artificial "popular demand" nerfs. This was a blatant test case to see how people react to artificial limits. Cheer it on and you're going to see lots of video card dlc in the future.
Lol, DLC, why stop there if you can get a "premium mode" monthly subscription? Don't worry it will have other benefits like
additional self learning AI techniques to optimize settings for your specific hardware and OS setup.
 
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Lol, DLC, why stop there if you can get a "premium mode" monthly subscription? Don't worry it will have other benefits like self learning AI to optimize settings for your specific hardware and OS setup.
Just like some cars, everything is there except you can't use all of it unless you subscribe to each locked item. It works there, why not Nvidia video cards, you want to mine -> we get 25% of the coins mined -> Play games, three levels, normal, better, best: Each subscription level gives you more performance as you move up and more features, plus the best level gives you a free "Nvidia I Love You" Tee-Shirt (our best deal).
 
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