News Despite Nvidia's Hash Limit, RTX 3060 Can Still Earn Up To $7 a Day Mining

[Admin]

It turns out the RTX 3060 doesn't put the brakes on when mining coins other than Ether.

Despite Nvidia's Hash Limit, RTX 3060 Can Still Earn Up To $7 a Day Mining : Read more

 

[Phaaze88]

Pfft! Bahahahahahah!

Oh, would you look at that... thar's still profits to be made after all!

 

[GenericUser]

Is it all just a complicated PR stunt?

Yes.

 

[sstanic]

and it is not even complicated.

 

[bigdragon]

I'm worried Nvidia's hash rate limiter is going to get some false positives and affect non-mining applications. A lot of us use Nvidia GPUs for 3D art. I would be furious if Nvidia degraded performance for Blender or Zbrush. I wouldn't care if it was an accident or not intended.

Nvidia needs to leverage Geforce Experience to get GPUs to gamers. You have all the analytics data right there -- library of games, number of hours played, years of being a gamer, etc. Sell the cards through Geforce Experience already. It should be absolutely trivial to separate gamers from miners and to limit how many GPUs an individual account can acquire. Is it perfect? No, but sure better than cat and mouse solutions.

 

[VforV]

This is getting more ridiculous by the day...

 

[akarub]

As a result, if the Ethereum protocol were to change even slightly, for example, the update to Ethereum 2.0 with the new Proof-of-Stake mining model, the entire mining limiter would likely cease to be useful.

What? Whoever wrote the article should have done better research.

Proof-of-Work is mining.

Proof-of-Stake is not mining.

PoS will not need GPUs. Actually, Ethereum has already started the switch from PoW to PoS (Ethereum 2.0), with the successful launch of Phase 0 in past December. There are already 98k validators on PoS, proposing and attesting new blocks, and getting rewards for that. They don't need GPUs for that.

This is a good source of information: https://launchpad.ethereum.org/

 

[VforV]

I'm just gonna leave this here, in case someone missed it. The 2nd part of the video is related to the subject here: nvidia and mining.

 

[InvalidError]

I'm worried Nvidia's hash rate limiter is going to get some false positives and affect non-mining applications. A lot of us use Nvidia GPUs for 3D art.

I doubt anything resembling typical 3D shader work will cause false positives simply due to the variety of shaders contained in a typical 3D scene all with very different behaviors and dependencies using many instructions that mining will never touch except as artificially added to trick detection algorithms. For example, 3D work is FP-heavy and nearly all results require rounding while mining deals primarily with exact integers where rounding simply must not happen.

 

[lazyabum]

ImgTec PowerVR Caustic Ray Tracing RTU and GR6500 Wizard could've achieved real time Ray Tracing plus would've been cryptomining proof.

 

[usiname]

Nvidia needs to leverage Geforce Experience to get GPUs to gamers. You have all the analytics data right there -- library of games, number of hours played, years of being a gamer, etc. Sell the cards through Geforce Experience already. It should be absolutely trivial to separate gamers from miners and to limit how many GPUs an individual account can acquire. Is it perfect? No, but sure better than cat and mouse solutions.

What about peoples that not use Geforce Experience, has AMD/Intel GPU or content creators? You can't make investigation for everyone. The best solution is to limit 1 GPU per person, still not 100% effective, but at least is something. Now I looking for new GPU and every time when I make call to any retailer they ask me how many I want to get when they have stock.

 

[dalek1234]

Nvidia never does anything that benefits others instead of Nvidia. I suspect they are making 3060 less desireble to miners, so that miners buy the more expensive cards which have bigger profit margins. Jensen is an a-hole, so there is an ulterior motive inside this PR BS.

 

[Chung Leong]

I'm worried Nvidia's hash rate limiter is going to get some false positives and affect non-mining applications. A lot of us use Nvidia GPUs for 3D art. I would be furious if Nvidia degraded performance for Blender or Zbrush. I wouldn't care if it was an accident or not intended.

My guess is that the rate-limiter targets the memory sub-system. The Ethash algorithm accesses memory locations at random. That means the cache hit rate will be close to zero. Programs doing legitimate work won't behave in such a manner.

 

[usiname]

Nvidia never does anything that benefits others instead of Nvidia. I suspect they are making 3060 less desireble to miners, so that miners buy the more expensive cards which have bigger profit margins. Jensen is an a-hole, so there is an ulterior motive inside this PR BS.

Nvidia haven't benefit to sell GPU that is good for both gaming and mining. That is why they will force gamers to buy RTX, while the miners will be forced to get their "specialized" trash cards that are useless for everything even for mining with their poor performance and then the miners should get more of them to get same profit.

 

[itzmec]

and later in the year, when the bull run is done, and the bubble pops, it'll make you about 50 cents a day.

 

[Phaaze88]

There's no happy end for everyone at the end of all this.

ASIC miners are far more efficient at mining. Problem with that is the cost, which knocks a crap ton of people out of the mining gold rush. Basically, only the wealthy need apply... huh, funny how that works.
Gpu mining is cheaper and accessible(LOL) to everyone. Problem: it's definitely a step backwards in how much more energy it wastes, especially if/as it becomes more widely adopted, but I guess no one wants to consider the long term effects of this waste.
It's always been about the short term gains - we'll worry about the problems later, or pass it off to some other shmuck.

 

[bigdragon]

What about peoples that not use Geforce Experience, has AMD/Intel GPU or content creators? You can't make investigation for everyone. The best solution is to limit 1 GPU per person, still not 100% effective, but at least is something. Now I looking for new GPU and every time when I make call to any retailer they ask me how many I want to get when they have stock.

1 GPU or console per person hasn't worked. The person just comes back over and over again. There's entire Reddit and Twitter threads dedicated to telling scalpers and miners how to be first in line at Microcenter, Best Buy, Walmart, and Fry's and other stores. Online retailers are doing 1 product per transaction. Scalpers readily create multiple accounts, names, and addresses to circumvent protections. Using Geforce Experience, Steam, Epic, PSN, XBox Live, and other services can definitely separate gamers from non-gamers based on account histories, games libraries, friends lists, and so on.

Is this solution perfect? No. It absolutely gives gamers a chance to get products usually snatched up by bots though.

 

[InvalidError]

Using Geforce Experience, Steam, Epic, PSN, XBox Live, and other services can definitely separate gamers from non-gamers based on account histories, games libraries, friends lists, and so on.

So, someone who may be new to PC gaming and has none of the above gets locked out of using the GPU he/she just bought? Or someone who is doing a fresh re-install gets locked out of using the GPU until all of the bloat is re-installed?

 

[bigdragon]

So, someone who may be new to PC gaming and has none of the above gets locked out of using the GPU he/she just bought? Or someone who is doing a fresh re-install gets locked out of using the GPU until all of the bloat is re-installed?

No, I'm only talking about the sales channel. Stop dumping GPU stock on Amazon, Best Buy, Walmart, and other traditional retailers. We can easily see on Twitter and Discord that miners and scalpers are handily beating out actual gamers in acquiring GPUs. Sell gaming products to gamers through gamer storefronts. Problem not solved, but should help greatly.

 

[shadowssinging]

There's a very simple fix that they could make, which would all but kill mining without meaningfully impacting gamers. Mining rigs generally try to run as many GPUs off a single motherboard as possible. That's detectable. They also often run those GPUs off single PCIe lanes. That's also detectable, even if the mining rig tries to hide the other GPUs via IOMMU or other methods.

If either is detected, then the card goes into a "mining sabotage" mode, errors are randomly introduced, the clock rate declines exponentially with total power on hours, random lockups occur, and just generally, make the card look broken.

Gamers aren't going to connect cards to single PCIe lanes (you need adapters, and gaming performance would be terrible), and they aren't going to put 4 to 16 cards in a single system, so they'd be completely unaffected.

 

[InvalidError]

They also often run those GPUs off single PCIe lanes. That's also detectable, even if the mining rig tries to hide the other GPUs via IOMMU or other methods.

They could use PCIe switches to expand the number of available PCIe lanes and trick GPUs into thinking they have an x4 or even x8 slot when they actually only have an x1 or are sharing an x8 with a bunch of other cards. At that point though, it may be cheaper to just use a Threadripper or entry-level EPYC platform.

Where there is a will and enough cash on the line, there is a way to get around just about anything.

 

[shadowssinging]

They could use PCIe switches to expand the number of available PCIe lanes and trick GPUs into thinking they have an x4 or even x8 slot when they actually only have an x1 or are sharing an x8 with a bunch of other cards. At that point though, it may be cheaper to just use a Threadripper or entry-level EPYC platform.

Where there is a will and enough cash on the line, there is a way to get around just about anything.

True, but at the end of the day, to be successful, they only have to make the mining cards they are introducing artificially cheaper for the application than the gaming cards by enough of a margin that it's not worth buying a "full fledged" GPU.

Also, future product releases can have more sophisticated deterrents - with as bad as the bot purchase problem has been with 30xx series cards, measures like e-fuses and activation locks don't seem so ridiculous.

 

[InvalidError]

Also, future product releases can have more sophisticated deterrents - with as bad as the bot purchase problem has been with 30xx series cards, measures like e-fuses and activation locks don't seem so ridiculous.

Until people start ending up with bricked GPUs due to a false positive or mistake that wouldn't have caused issues otherwise. Each layer of obfuscation is one more thing that can go wrong in unforeseen ways.

 

[artk2219]

There's a very simple fix that they could make, which would all but kill mining without meaningfully impacting gamers. Mining rigs generally try to run as many GPUs off a single motherboard as possible. That's detectable. They also often run those GPUs off single PCIe lanes. That's also detectable, even if the mining rig tries to hide the other GPUs via IOMMU or other methods.

If either is detected, then the card goes into a "mining sabotage" mode, errors are randomly introduced, the clock rate declines exponentially with total power on hours, random lockups occur, and just generally, make the card look broken.

Gamers aren't going to connect cards to single PCIe lanes (you need adapters, and gaming performance would be terrible), and they aren't going to put 4 to 16 cards in a single system, so they'd be completely unaffected.

Not so simple, there are lots of scientific workstations and servers that do the same thing, and accidentally blocking those out is a much bigger problem.