Nvidia will add anti-mining flags to the rest of its RTX 3000 GPU series going forward

Krenum

Krenum

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https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/202...flags-to-the-rest-of-its-rtx-3000-gpu-series/

"Nvidia's Tuesday announcement confirmed that most consumer-grade GPUs coming out of the company's factories, ranging from the RTX 3060 Ti to the RTX 3080, will ship with a new sticker to indicate a "Lite Hash Rate," or "LHR," on the hardware, driver, and BIOS level".

*[Update, 2:18 pm EDT: In an email interview with Ars, Del Rizzo clarifies that "Ethereum represents more than 90 percent of GPU-mineable coin rewards, so that's our focus currently." He also points to the new SKUs' hashing rate being affected by "a similar process to what we announced with the original RTX 3060, in that the lite hash rate uses a secure handshake between the driver, the RTX GPU silicon, and the BIOS (firmware)."]

**Tuesday's Nvidia blog post concludes with an assurance that "we believe this additional step will get more GeForce cards at better prices into the hands of gamers everywhere."
 
Ranulfo said:
Will Leather Jacket-man drop prices too? Since, well... you can't mine eth etc. in your non game time to make up for the insane prices of said gpus.
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Leather Jacket man put Best Buy in charge of selling at MSRP, whether or not you'll be able to get one at MSRP is debatable. But I guess making them less desirable to miners gives us a better chance than before.
 
[Spectre] said:
They are using superglue on the stickers.
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And we know how good Nvidia is with stickers.

GTX-970-memory-issue-e1469724337547.jpg
 
Krenum said:
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/202...flags-to-the-rest-of-its-rtx-3000-gpu-series/

"Nvidia's Tuesday announcement confirmed that most consumer-grade GPUs coming out of the company's factories, ranging from the RTX 3060 Ti to the RTX 3080, will ship with a new sticker to indicate a "Lite Hash Rate," or "LHR," on the hardware, driver, and BIOS level".

*[Update, 2:18 pm EDT: In an email interview with Ars, Del Rizzo clarifies that "Ethereum represents more than 90 percent of GPU-mineable coin rewards, so that's our focus currently." He also points to the new SKUs' hashing rate being affected by "a similar process to what we announced with the original RTX 3060, in that the lite hash rate uses a secure handshake between the driver, the RTX GPU silicon, and the BIOS (firmware)."]

**Tuesday's Nvidia blog post concludes with an assurance that "we believe this additional step will get more GeForce cards at better prices into the hands of gamers everywhere."
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HS!
 
Zarathustra[H] said:
Didn't the last anti-mining measures get defeated in less than two weeks?

Is there any reason to believe these will work any better?
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yea, the GPU gods said "the lite hash rate uses a secure handshake between the driver, the RTX GPU silicon, and the BIOS (firmware)."

safe and secure :barefoot:
 
Did they actually bypass the rtx 3060 lockdown? I know about the broken developer driver, but even that has it's limitations.
 
thecold said:
Did they actually bypass the rtx 3060 lockdown? I know about the broken developer driver, but even that has it's limitations.
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Were any of its limitations due to any hardware-level controls?
 
Axman said:
Were any of its limitations due to any hardware-level controls?
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I don't see any threads about rtx 3060 actually working in linux at full speeds, they were able to increase the speed. However it's only about 3/4 of the speed and only on certain drivers.
 
Limiting mining worked real well for them recently. Very doubtful this is any better.
 
If the limiting is widespread enough it might have some impact but the main issue is the demand even without miners into the picture far succeeds the volumes they can ship right now so at best a widespread mining limiting will only slightly speed up the process when it would normalize again say instead of 10-12 months maybe we're talking 8-10 months. I personally don't want to pay a heavily influated price either so for me I'm pretty certain it won't be like until a year / sometimes next spring before I might fancy upgrade my graphics card but that's just a pure guess, who knows how the chip shortage develops and how the cryptocurrency market develops and how the covid pandemic is going to be in some months or a year from now on or whatever political conflicts there will be...
 
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Yeah, people act like this won't make a difference but it will.

There is a ton of demand for GPUs from gamers. It could take several years to make that many GPUs.

But there is unlimited demand from miners. They make their money back on the cards so they'll buy every single card they can, even if they already have 20. Their demand will never be fulfilled, there will always be a shortage until the next generation of cards comes out.

If nvidia sells cards miners can't use, and the miners can't circumvent it eventually supply will catch up to demand and every gamer that wants to buy a GPU will be able to.
Otherwise the supply shortage will never end.
 
sharknice said:
Yeah, people act like this won't make a difference but it will.

There is a ton of demand for GPUs from gamers. It could take several years to make that many GPUs.

But there is unlimited demand from miners. They make their money back on the cards so they'll buy every single card they can, even if they already have 20. Their demand will never be fulfilled, there will always be a shortage until the next generation of cards comes out.

If nvidia sells cards miners can't use, and the miners can't circumvent it eventually supply will catch up to demand and every gamer that wants to buy a GPU will be able to.
Otherwise the supply shortage will never end.
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If this ends up being the case it is good for gamers. If it works I wonder if Nvidia will do this going forward for future generations.
 
Current situation:
Miners are buying up gaming cards making it nearly impossible for gamers to get cards which are already in short supply.
Cause:
Gaming cards get the same mining performance as mining cards, are cheaper, and have better resale value because they can be gamed on.


Possible Future:
Gamers are buying up mining cards making it nearly impossible for miners to get cards which are already in short supply. 😈😈😈😈😈
Cause:
Mining cards are just gaming cards without video outputs, but gamers circumvent this by using software "hacks" to render on the mining card and output through their onboard video, or old video card's outputs. (actually has been done IRL already btw)


This is a real possibility because there will still be a shortage of gaming cards even if miners stop buying them and there are plenty of desperate gamers willing to get anything they can get. Instead of miners having the options of both gaming and mining hardware they'll only be able to use mining hardware, and instead of gamers only being able to use gaming cards they'll be able to use gaming or mining cards and get their revenge on the miners. Making mining cards even harder to get driving up prices and scalping.
 
At least they are nice enough to include a sticker to differentiate between the normal and crippled version.
 
Gaming cards do compute. Why? Because it is useful. If it computes, it can mine.

Nvidia is trying a "hack" that makes certain types of compute more difficult to do, but I'm guessing that it can be "worked around".
 
No matter what you think about miners, this should not stand on principle alone. We cannot normalize and justify a hardware manufacturer hobbling their product intentionally, no matter what you think of mining . This is a massively slippery slope and should not be tolerated. This is even more sleazy with Nvidia's history of seeking out the proprietary vs the open and choosing restriction the vast majority of the time, not to mention the fact that I'm sure that the upcoming miner-limited variations of the cards are unlikely to have a significant reduction of MSRP despite being functionally less useful.

Putting aside the mining boom and the shortage, lets not forget that over the last two generations Nvidia's GPUs have significantly increased in cost for equivalent tiers, (ie $699 1080 Ti, $1299 2080 Ti, , $1499 3090 starting prices for reference models!) and these sort of changes mean that some gamer with a single card in each of their PCs can't even mine a little bit in the off time to help defer some of the costs, not to mention other workloads. If NV's miner limitations aren't completely toothless, they're going to affect other sorts of uses. The GPU doesn't know or care that its mining, its simply efficiently running certain workloads based on its hardware configuration. Putting aside the ethical and value implications, its likely that attempting to hobble "ethhash" workloads will either be either extremely specific and therefore toothless when users switch to another crypto (or algo - some crypto can vote to do that and you're going to have people owning tons of hardware or crypto using their "stake" to vote to do so in their vested interest!) or it will affect all kinds of workloads and Nvidia will have to decide what is more important especially if they start getting bad PR.

If Nvidia was really serious about supporting gamers exclusively they could not only release variants of each card dramatically cheaper if they are going to hobble them (unlikely- they just love this shortage), but they could also make even cheaper cut-down versions of the cards - consider a GTX 1660 vs 2060 analog. Some may know that despite great gaming performance the AMD 6000 series does not have as good mining performance for the money vs Nvidia's modern cards. Hell, AMD's previous 5000 generation and Vega cards, which had a more mining-friendly generalist hardware configuration today sell for over MSRP in their prime due to the shortage and their configuration being favorable to mining much in the same way that Nvidia's Tensor cores allow in their 3000 series. If NV really wanted to support gaming instead of attempting to shackle their hardware's performance on certain workloads, they could make cut-down for vastly cheaper without that hardware configuration that makes it so miner-desirable ..... but we know they'll never do that, don't we? Besides their focus on things like CUDA on the professional side and even their consumer cards, Nvidia has spent previous and especially current generations making raytracting, DLSS, and other features that run on some of the same hardware components that are so efficient for mining in the way they've configured them, their primary advertising focus for gaming because they have this particular hardware configuration on their cards. They could make revamped versions of their GPUs that were more akin to AMD in that they could do raytracing , DLSS, and other functions on shared hardware hardware instead of the discrete specific tensor cores, charging less in the process but that doesn't seem likely as they'd lose the edge (and the rhetoric used to claim they win this generation overall by focusing almost entirely on raytracing / DLSS ) or have to change methodology.

No matter if these LHR card variants remain limiting mining for just one hash style or if they limit many, if it is broken within a week to provide near/equal mining performance or if it stays locked down for the foreseeable future, this is not a good move from Nvidia. This will ultimately have little benefit to gamers accessibility or value for a whole host of different reasons, but those individual issues aside we should not accept nor normalize hardware being shackled in this regard!
 
RanceJustice said:
No matter what you think about miners, this should not stand on principle alone. We cannot normalize and justify a hardware manufacturer hobbling their product intentionally, no matter what you think of mining .
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Why? Its their product, they made it. They can do whatever they want with it. Its up to the consumer to decide if they want to buy it or not. That's the beauty of a free market, we get to decide what we embrace and what fails.
 
Krenum said:
That's the beauty of a free market, we get to decide what we embrace and what fails.
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It's not entirely a free market. There are only two GPU companies, with a third maybe on the way.
 
Axman said:
It's not entirely a free market. There are only two GPU companies, with a third maybe on the way.
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It is, why do you think there are only two GPU companies? All the others failed to give the customers what they wanted or they mismanaged their business and were forced to dissolve or sell to the larger company that was succeeding.
 
Whether or not a market used to be free or fair has no bearing on whether or not a market currently is free or fair.
 
Axman said:
It's not entirely a free market. There are only two GPU companies, with a third maybe on the way.
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There are a lot more than 2, Intel is by far and wide still the #1 graphics card provider, Matrox still makes their own silicon as does ASpeed, then there is AMD, Apple, and ARM.
 
Zarathustra[H] said:
Didn't the last anti-mining measures get defeated in less than two weeks?

Is there any reason to believe these will work any better?
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No

it’s still not defeated as far as I’ve heard.
Rather a developer driver without the limitation was accidentally released to the Dev community and distributed like wildfire. Thing is you’ll not get any updates to that driver and Nvidia isn’t likely to make that mistake twice.
 
Archaea said:
No

it’s still not defeated as far as I’ve heard.
Rather a developer driver without the limitation was accidentally released to the Dev community and distributed like wildfire. Thing is you’ll not get any updates to that driver and Nvidia isn’t likely to make that mistake twice.
Click to expand...

The method they're using for the LHR cards doesn't work the same way. It's an actual hardware level change. They're using the same technique they do to nerf FP64 performance in gaming GPUs so people to buy their professional cards.
 
RanceJustice said:
No matter what you think about miners, this should not stand on principle alone. We cannot normalize and justify a hardware manufacturer hobbling their product intentionally, no matter what you think of mining . This is a massively slippery slope and should not be tolerated. This is even more sleazy with Nvidia's history of seeking out the proprietary vs the open and choosing restriction the vast majority of the time, not to mention the fact that I'm sure that the upcoming miner-limited variations of the cards are unlikely to have a significant reduction of MSRP despite being functionally less useful.
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At the end of the day, Nv can choose to sell to whomever they want.
And as a news flash for you, hardware manufacturers hobbling their hardware was normalized from the first day they started binning for speed. Processor, ram, and gpu manufacturers have been gimping their products to meet demand at various price points since the beginning. You don't think that they label every chip that bins at max speed as their flagship do you? Where is the exclusivity in that? They purposely downgrade some of their chips, provided the yield at the flagship speeds exceeds expected demand, to meet demands at various price points. Pro cards vs consumer cards is another example. It has always been this way fyi.
If Nv wants to sell compute cards to miners, and graphics cards to gamers, they can. It's not new, it's not even problematic. Well, unless you are a miner.
Miners, and scalpers certainly don't care about me sooooo, you can prolly guess how little I care about them.
 
Gorankar said:
At the end of the day, Nv can choose to sell to whomever they want.
And as a news flash for you, hardware manufacturers hobbling their hardware was normalized from the first day they started binning for speed. Processor, ram, and gpu manufacturers have been gimping their products to meet demand at various price points since the beginning. You don't think that they label every chip that bins at max speed as their flagship do you? Where is the exclusivity in that? They purposely downgrade some of their chips, provided the yield at the flagship speeds exceeds expected demand, to meet demands at various price points. Pro cards vs consumer cards is another example. It has always been this way fyi.
If Nv wants to sell compute cards to miners, and graphics cards to gamers, they can. It's not new, it's not even problematic. Well, unless you are a miner.
Miners, and scalpers certainly don't care about me sooooo, you can prolly guess how little I care about them.
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Not to mention their artificial gimping of cards on different OSs. Try installing one of the nonpro Radeon cards on Windows Server and watch it cry you a river, or use an NV card on a server with RDP hosting enabled, and the card suddenly not report correctly to connected users. They all define some pretty narrow support scopes for their product stacks to justify the existence of others. Now if you will excuse me I need to go explain this to accounting because I am sitting here with a 14K quote for my NV vGPU licensing that they don't understand the need for.


EDIT:
One of the accountants cracked a joke that the server was cheaper than trying to buy a couple of PS5's, so they've more or less rubber-stamped the project but yeah 32K for a pair of RTX 6000's and some other tidbits isn't terrible. They understood the hardware was going to be costly, but the VMWare and RTX vWS licensing caught them by surprise.
 
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sharknice said:
Yeah, people act like this won't make a difference but it will.

There is a ton of demand for GPUs from gamers. It could take several years to make that many GPUs.

But there is unlimited demand from miners. They make their money back on the cards so they'll buy every single card they can, even if they already have 20. Their demand will never be fulfilled, there will always be a shortage until the next generation of cards comes out.

If nvidia sells cards miners can't use, and the miners can't circumvent it eventually supply will catch up to demand and every gamer that wants to buy a GPU will be able to.
Otherwise the supply shortage will never end.
Click to expand...
Demand needs to be met by BF6 release date. Hoping.
 
Basically putting out a Loser Edition. I for one won't buy any cards rated low performance anything.

Ethereum is their focus but with it going PoS what's the point or am I missing something ?
 
Axman said:
Whether or not a market used to be free or fair has no bearing on whether or not a market currently is free or fair.
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Well, what is it? Should the government step in? Inquiring minds want to know.
 
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