Continuing their ongoing efforts to restrict the Ethereum mining efficiency of their GeForce video playing cards – and thus make them much less engaging for miners – NVIDIA as we speak has introduced that they’re bringing their cryptocurrency hash limiter to further GeForce playing cards. Already a fixture on the vanilla GeForce RTX 3060 because it’s launch, NVIDIA has begun incorporating their hash limiting know-how and its related safety stack into newly manufacture purple GeForce RTX 3080, 3070, and 3060 Ti playing cards. The new playing cards will seem on cabinets later this month, and can carry the “LHR” branding to distinguish themselves from the first-generation, unthrottled playing cards.
We’ve been masking the continuing matter of NVIDIA and Ethereum mining for a number of months now, as the corporate has labored to take care of the sudden (and largely unmanageable) surge in video card demand that has come as the value of Ethereum tokens has exploded. Even with the cryptocurrency down virtually 20% in every week, Ethereum mining continues to be fairly worthwhile on NVIDIA playing cards. Which in flip has contributed to an unprecedented and sustained spike in demand for video playing cards that NVIDIA (and AMD) are unable to fulfill.
In order to make their playing cards much less helpful to miners – and to attempt to shift shipments again to gaming clients – NVIDIA started rolling out an Ethereum hash limiter, beginning with their GeForce RTX 3060 card again in February. NVIDIA’s hash limiter throttles a card’s Ethereum mining efficiency to 50% of its native charge, decreasing (although not eliminating) a card’s usefulness and profitability for mining. Overall, this preliminary rollout didn’t go fairly as deliberate due to an unforced error on NVIDIA’s half that partially disabled the throttle. But it clearly has not deterred NVIDIA as they’ve continued to refine their hash limiter and, now, are increasing it to different playing cards.
To that finish, NVIDIA is including the hash limiter to new GeForce RTX 3080, 3070, and 3060 Ti playing cards. As at all times, the corporate isn’t sharing a lot in the best way of technical particulars, but it surely seems to be like this is similar hash limiter that’s going into revised GeForce RTX 3060 playing cards, which started transport in the course of this month. Key amongst that know-how is an up to date vBIOS that requires a minimal driver model – 466.71 within the case of hash-limited 3080/3070/3060Ti playing cards – stopping their use with older drivers that lack throttling capabilities. Through the mix of the revised vBIOS and drivers, NVIDIA in flip is ready to detect and restrict the Ethereum hashing efficiency of those new playing cards.
| NVIDIA GeForce RTX 30 Series Release Info | ||||
| Original | LHR/Revised | |||
| RTX 3090 | 09/2020 | – | ||
| RTX 3080 | 09/2020 | Late May | ||
| RTX 3070 | 10/2020 | Late May | ||
| RTX 3060 Ti | 12/2020 | Late May | ||
| RTX 3060* | 02/2021 | Mid May | ||
*RTX 3060 shipped with an earlier model of NVIDIA’s hash limiter
Meanwhile, these new playing cards will likely be receiving further labeling to distinguish them from the unique technology of unthrottled playing cards. Calling this throttling function “Lite Hash Rate”, or “LHR”, in response to NVIDIA there will likely be LHR branding/data placed on the related product bins in addition to on retail web sites. Ostensibly, that is to speak to consumers that the playing cards are hash-limited, however on the similar time it’s doubtless that this branding is required for authorized causes as nicely, as NVIDIA is introducing a further limitation that was not current on the unique technology of playing cards.
This is a barely totally different branding technique from how they’ve dealt with the RTX 3060, owing largely to the RTX 3060 transport with a hash limiter from day one. In the case of the RTX 3060, even when NVIDIA started transport revised playing cards earlier this month…
