Nvidia tackles mining with its GPUs

GeForce RTX 3060. © Nvidia.

Gamers have a big problem: they’ve been bereft of graphics cards for months due to the scarcity of GPUs available for sale. This shortage is due to a combination of a lack of semiconductors and pressure applied to the GPU market by cryptocurrency miners, who are big consumers of graphics cards. Now, Nvidia made an announcement that gamers are digging: when it launched its new GeForce RTX 3060 graphics card on Thursday, February 25, it said its performance would be halved specifically by Ethereum cryptocurrency mining applications, the hash rate limitation being triggered by any process that uses Dagger Hashimoto or Ethash-like algorithms. Nvidia’s message is clear: their GeForce RTX graphics cards are meant for gaming, not for some other questionable use like mining other distributed computing applications. It remains to be seen if this new measure will actually have the intended effect on the availability of GPUs. Nvidia says that the throttling, which is performed through drivers, will not affect the performance of GPUs it has already sold. It also says that it has developed a dedicated product for miners, the Cryptocurrency Mining Processor (CMP). It is not known if Nvidia will apply this new process to all new GeForce cards.

⇨ The Verge, Tom Warren, “Nvidia is nerfing its new RTX 3060 for Ethereum cryptocurrency mining.”

2021-02-24