Mining vs Gaming Products or something *spawn*

I guess the worry of getting sued is big enough deterrent to not do this type of thing retroactively. Class action lawsuits can be nasty business even if one wins in the end.

 

The 3060 driver is a universal driver for all GPUs, it's also an inevitable upgrade path for all current GPUs if you want to maintain new game and feature compatibility. All drivers after it will also carry the same mining limitations.

 

I'm expecting them to not only do this to all 30 series cards which are already sold through driver updates but also add something to achieve this in future ReBAR BIOS updates and alter future cards of already launched models for them to not work with old drivers anymore.

They are seemingly locking down mining on gaming GPUs. Three years too late if you ask me.

 

Miners can chose to still use the old (now current) drivers, can't and won't they?
From what Nvidia stated, I am not a 100% clear on whether or not they would enforce this for cards down to 3060 Ti anyway, because what could they possibly gain except rage-mode gamers who try to use their cards over night for a little amortization. The people running the mining farms will use the old drivers anyway.

 

I am curious why the time lag was this significant. Mining driving up prices and the lengths miners would go to to get cards would be clear indicators that they were less price-sensitive, meaning Nvidia would be leaving money on the table for years.
The fingerprints for a card running a dedicated mining workload are really clear, and while I've not kept tabs on this for a while, I'm under the impression that GPU-mined coins still typically target the same set of bottlenecks in a manner very dissimilar to what games would do. That's not including the potentially counter-intuitive clocking of core clocks versus memory, if a coin happens to be memory transaction-limited versus math-limited.

Something like a rolling average of activity counters coupled with a duty-cycling of mining-targeted bottlenecks could make this a non-issue for primarily gaming rigs.

While not mining related, I would cite the utilization graph in the following to show how spiky game behavior is, not counting other elements like the various synchronization and graphics calls that would produce stalls or otherwise compromise mining efficiency.

Having a program take some percentage of the GPU's execution time in a 24-48 hour period that leaves it waiting on vsync or API barriers regularly wouldn't be problematic for a gaming rig, rather it's the point of it.
The penalty, like maybe duty cycling the mining workload's bottleneck might not even be noticeable for a game workload as spiky as what is referenced. However, a hashing algorithm that does its best to max out the memory bus 24 hours a day is going to notice, and even a less onerous penalty than halving the hash rate could still be enough to make an economic case for either avoiding a non-mining card or paying more for a mining variant. Other optimizations like odd voltage/clock combinations would stand out as well.

 

I'm seeing sentiment like this but I don't know if people should assume it's so simple. Certainly the methods they've used to segment Geforce and Quadros/Teslas (or whatever they're called now, "Professional Cards?") hasn't been bypassed, or at least not in any wide released fashion. If a select few do find a bypass will the release it into the wild or keep it as a competitive advantage? Even then I think a primary concern for Nvidia was the retail channel. So if larger players who are securing directly from higher up (eg. AiBs) are able to bypass and still buy them that is possible addressable in other ways.

As for overall availability, realistically there's going to be pent up back demand from the mining spike over the last 2 months combined with the still ongoing issues. Original forecasts prior to mining were that we might start seeing relief starting in early Q2, this will obviously be delayed even if mining demand hypothetically were to zero for now. Unless they're being very aggressive in terms of GA106 allocation (are they aiming for another GP106/GTX 1060?) we're likely still going into the summer months as minimum before any real ease up.

It seems messy. I don't know feel it'll be worth it to Nvidia to go at this issue with existing cards in the channel. We have to keep in mind to not assume that Nvidia is actually anti mining. I suspect one factor Nvidia doesn't like currently is that gaming demand (at least they feel and the data suggests it) is enough currently to saturate the supply chain. to Keeping specific retail bound SKUs as mining capable is also a great hedge should the need arise and if gaming demand does go down (eventually) to manageable levels.

We have to keep in mind that the mining spikes have so far been cyclical with relatively short runs (<1 years) and there's only really been 3 total periods including now. The first case Nvidia wasn't even involved although they did have some indirect benefits due to a lack of AMD cards in the gaming channel. The second period spike was the last one, it however ended and game in a period that Nvidia (and AMD) could increase shipments and sell what they otherwise wouldn't have (which we would see in there revenue statements). This period is different in that Nvidia was already selling whatever they could so they didn't really need the additional demand from mining (which may be detrimental to them from a longer term strategic view).

It'll be interesting to see what details of what they're doing start to come out as well. Originally when this was rumored to happen a simple method I thought off to at least dent demand would be to put restrictions in place should they detect a lack of x16 (or x8) PCIe links and/or multiple graphics adapters since Nvidia no longer promotes multi-graphics usage in a single system for Geforce outside of the RTX 3090 (which is already being marketed as a prosumer card, so if people want it for "pro" use in mining have at it I guess).

But I guess they're going to actually be doing some kind of heuristics directly tackle it. I'd wonder though since they have been promoting more general compute usage with even Geforce (eg. see studio drivers, all the Geforce launch slides showcased rendering workload improvements) and a general uptick in consumers buying GPUs for this how that would be differentiated with the above speculation in the twitter post. What's say GPU usage look like in off line rendering workloads? video encode? machine learning (inference)?

 

Nvidia doesn't care , they just want to sell old chips again for profit. This will be forgot in a year when eth 2.0 hits and then you have to mine something like raven coin to make money again.

 

NVIDIA is a business...what company does not want to sell at a profit?

 

Nvidia cares a lot. Miners are destroying one of their two core markets. And they don't get much from miners since they are selling cards according to MSPRs.

They don't want to sell old chips at all but this is what miners will get because that's what they deserve.

It's been four years I've been listening about ETH 2.0 coming in a year.

 

Quote: There is a secure handshake between the driver, the RTX 3060 silicon, and the BIOS (firmware) that prevents removal of the hash rate limiter.

 

My guess is that all refresh SKU's will have this in place...but it will still make people whine

 

Unfortunately this also impacts corporations and students using daytime gpu's for bitcoin mining at night.

 

They just need to buy twice as many to get the same output, right?

 

This.

 

Another way to say same is that it doubles the time it takes to make the card profitable for mining. Is doubling enough of deterrent? Perhaps the mining cards are priced so that considering this doubled time for consumer cards it's more cost efficient to by crypto card instead? Another thing is that sooner or later crypto will bust again,... It could be tomorrow or years. Who knows.

 

Nvidia doesn't care. They are out to sell the most gpu's at the highest possible cost.

Miners and gamers are buying up all the stock. There isn't inventory just sitting there not moving. That is a great thing for Nvidia and its even better when they can then take old chips on a old process that isn't supper limited and then sell those at high prices .

Maybe they should just re release the 10 series because thats what gamers deserve ?

As for eth 2.0 who knows , thats the point its a gamble. Miners will just stick to the 3060ti and above and still buy up all the stock or find ways around the issue.

 

No. They are out to sell GPUs at a predictable rate to people who they know. Miners destroy this market and lead to them having financial issues during "hangovers". Miners aren't even a valid long term market to consider. There is no point investing in it.

Do tell how miners deserve any of the new features of Ampere GPUs? How are they using them? 10 series would be a better fit for miners for sure but they are long gone off all lines and roadmaps.

And Nv will make their life more and more miserable. Who's to say that they can't lower the hash rate in future products to, say, 1%? It will still work. Just very slowly.

 

It would be in a way.

Anand has an article up the new mining cards are pretty bad

The 90HX for example is 86 mh/s 320w efficiency mh/s/w is .27 The 3090 is 121MH/s 290W and .42 . The 3070 on their charts lead the way at 62/117/.53 . Cut that in half and suddenly your not making much profit

The 3060 ti does 60MH/s @ 120w . Lets assume the 3060 is similar (the 3070 does 62@ 117w so its possible) If you cut that in half your at 30mh , even if you say it will only do 50 cut in half thats still 25.

The 30HX is 26@125w , the 40HX is 36@185w , 50hx is 45@250w. The 90hx (seems to be the only one based off the 30 series) does 86@320w.

Unless the crypto cards are much cheaper buying a 3060 at $300 and getting only 25-30mh at simliar power draw as the 3060ti would still be a net win for a miner. It puts it at simlar performance to the 30HX and maybe even the 40hx. Of course we don't know if you can change clock speeds and voltage and other things for the HX line. So i wont get into tuning the 3060.

Obviously for the $100 more (if you can get it at msrp) or even $200 more a 3060ti would be a better option than any of the mining cards. The closest HX would be the 50HX which does 45@250w vs 62@117w. There is no amount of tweaking the 50HX to get it anywhere close to being efficient as the 3070.

So at the end of the day unless the HX line is dirt cheap or they start nerfing cards above the 3060 nothing is going to change. Heck a 3070 in half rate mode is 31@117w which is far better than the 30hx which uses simliar power but less has rate 26@125 and leaps and better than the 40hx 36@185w.

When you look at anand's charts the 2080ti does 49@240 which is about on par with the 50hx which is 45@250w. So its obvious what Nvidia is doing here.


All this does is hurt the gamer who would buy a 3060 or another card and use it to game and while not gaming make extra money. Or even internet cafes that would put these in their machiens and make money while people aren't using the machine.

 

Maybe the kicker cards reduce eth mining rate aswell. Interesting to see if that happens and if the implementation is hacked or not. It should be possible to prevent flashing bios to new cards from old cards. Preventing meaning bios from older cards would brick the new card with different id. If the implementation is partly in bios the hack would require somehow changing etherium mining app to bypass the detection in bios. That should be difficult to do as eth mining requires specific kinds of memory accesses that are detectable.



If nv is selling cards not useful for games as mining cards that should show up in their profit margin once mining cards are sold. Maybe chips that have too many or specific broken units like display/... or chips that don't reach required clock speeds are used for mining cards. eth mining doesn't care that much about core speed, they are memory bound.

I think nvidia does care. Once mining busts the mining cards flowing to gaming market would be very bad for business. Remember the previous bust and how that inflated prices of used cards and tanked selling anything new,... Previous bust did happen on the most unfortunate time though. Market flooded with cheap used pascal cards just when turing released.

 

1) there is always people reselling cards. DO gamers mess up the market when they dump their old cards to buy the new cards ? Should gamers be punished for this ? I know when the 3070/80 came out people were dumping the 2070/80 line up. Think of all the money nvidia was loosing lol.

2)Miners deserve whatever they purchase ? If I buy a card I expect to be able to use it as I please. 10 series cards wouldn't be a good fit for miners , they are bad at mining and bad at their primary job of playing video games in 2021.

Why do gamers deserve any of the new features of ampere gpus ?

3) I am sure nvidia will face class action suits if they change already existing products on the market.