News Nvidia Limits RTX 3060 Hash Rate, Unveils New 'Cryptocurrency Mining Processor' Line of GPUs

[escksu]

I would equate buying a used GPU to buying a used rental car or marrying a prostitute. They've all been used and abused to the maximum by every guy that walks by for years on end. No, thanks.

Haha, its not just GPU. Nobody will want to buy anything that is 2nd hand. Unfortunately, not everyone can afford brand new ones.

 

[travsb1984]

Nvidia announced its upcoming RTX 3060 cards will be restricted in mining performance, at the same time it's bringing out a new Cryptocurrency Mining Processor (CMP) line of GPUs.

Nvidia Limits RTX 3060 Hash Rate, Unveils New 'Cryptocurrency Mining Processor' Line of GPUs : Read more

The more dedicated mining cards they sell the less used gaming cards that will be sold over the next few years. The less used gaming cards that are available in the market, the more new cards they wind up selling. This is just a stunt to sell more cards under the disguise of "helping" gamers. Not only that, in the process of "helping" gamers they're going to hurt gamers who want to mine with their gaming card on the side and don't have the recourses or desire to use hacked drivers... Par for the course when it comes to Nvidia.

 

[chalabam]

This hurts the gamers which want to mine the rest of the time.
They could be making around 5$/hour, which is enough to pay for the card in some months

 

[InvalidError]

VCZ has a post already showing how the Zotac RTX 3060 is tested in mining and without new drivers (which means its a BIOS limitation) the card starts at over 40MH/s and immediately drops at 20-ish MH/s.

Whatever Nvidia may have done in BIOS to reduce hash rates, it is likely only a matter of time before miners rewrite their shaders to get around it.

 

[itsmnte]

Is the GPU doing similar work when mining and rendering 3d models like in Octane? Will rendering time now double as well!?

 

[InvalidError]

Is the GPU doing similar work when mining and rendering 3d models like in Octane? Will rendering time now double as well!?

Probably not: 3D rendering and most GPGPU computing is FP-heavy while mining is almost entirely INT, so I doubt there is much of a chance of anything 3D-like getting mistaken for mining.

 

[cryoburner]

The launch MSRP of the 4GB 580 was $199, the 8GB was $229. AMD's cards traditionally sold below MSRP as time went on. Being able to buy those cards at $100 a year later on the used market is not a bottoming out of prices. If not for mining, nobody wanted these cards in the first place over what Nvidia was offering which was better across the board for gaming.

It's clearly false to claim the RX 580 was not as good as what Nvidia was offering, at least within a similar price/performance range, or that nobody wanted them for gaming. The RX 580 tends to be a little faster than a GTX 1060 6GB, despite having cost less throughout most of its time on the market. The 1060 had some advantages like lower power draw and a better realtime video encoder for live streaming, but otherwise the RX 580 was arguably a bit better from a hardware perspective, and tends to hold up better in newer games. And with the RX 570 compared to the 1050 Ti, it was no competition, provided one wasn't working within the confines of an OEM system with a very low capacity power supply, as the 570 was around 50% more powerful, for a similar, or in some cases lower price.

Who’s to say they don’t include the same gimping to workstation cards just to be sure miners don’t target them. I feel the software route is not the best solution.

Miners are not really targeting workstation cards because they already sell at a huge premium over what the equivalent consumer cards sell for, even when compared to the current marked-up prices.

 

[spongiemaster]

It's clearly false to claim the RX 580 was not as good as what Nvidia was offering, at least within a similar price/performance range, or that nobody wanted them for gaming. The RX 580 tends to be a little faster than a GTX 1060 6GB, despite having cost less throughout most of its time on the market. The 1060 had some advantages like lower power draw and a better realtime video encoder for live streaming, but otherwise the RX 580 was arguably a bit better from a hardware perspective, and tends to hold up better in newer games. And with the RX 570 compared to the 1050 Ti, it was no competition, provided one wasn't working within the confines of an OEM system with a very low capacity power supply, as the 570 was around 50% more powerful, for a similar, or in some cases lower price.

The 580 was an OK card when it was released a year earlier as an RX480. I'll quote from Anandtech's review of the 580:

"To get the elephant in the room out of the way first, power efficiency has taken a noticeable hit with the Radeon RX 580 ...
In practice this means that the RX 580 is only averaging 3% faster than the RX 480 it replaces in AMD’s product stack...
As for the competitive landscape then, AMD’s situation has improved, though I fear by not enough. Across the full spread of games in our benchmark suite, the RX 580 and GTX 1060 6GB change lead a few different times, so the RX 580 is able to best NVIDIA’s best in absolute performance in the right games. The problem for AMD is that those games appear to be too few; as a result the RX 580 trails the GTX 1060 by an average of 7% at both 1080p and 1440p. AMD has narrowed the gap somewhat – this was an 11% deficit with the RX 480 – but not by enough. And coupled with AMD’s worse power efficiency, this puts AMD in a tough spot. The biggest challenge right now is that GTX 1060 prices have come down to the same $229 spot just in time for the RX 500 series launch, so AMD doesn’t have a consistent price advantage. "

Nvidia offered a better product at this point in time. As InvalidError pointed out, AMD was practically giving these cards away for awhile because no one wanted them for gaming. Do a search for RX580 on this site and most of the results are for articles about "new lowest price" for an RX580. Prices don't keep dropping for in demand products. AMD isn't going to be dropping the price on the 6000 GPU's any time soon.

 

[UWguy]

This would give miners two SKUs to work with and gamers only one SKU. So miners still win in the end.

Agree. You still have a finite amount of silicon and now half of that supply is going to mining cards. Won’t this make it harder to obtain a card for gaming? Am I missing something here?

 

[InvalidError]

Agree. You still have a finite amount of silicon and now half of that supply is going to mining cards. Won’t this make it harder to obtain a card for gaming? Am I missing something here?

The chips going to mining-specific SKUs allegedly don't make the grade for consumer GPUs in the first place, so those may be chips with bad display outputs, bad PCIe lanes or any number of other not-necessarily-fatal defects that make them a no-go as a normal GPU but still perfectly suitable for mining on current popular algorithms.

 

[VforV]

The chips going to mining-specific SKUs allegedly don't make the grade for consumer GPUs in the first place, so those may be chips with bad display outputs, bad PCIe lanes or any number of other not-necessarily-fatal defects that make them a no-go as a normal GPU but still perfectly suitable for mining on current popular algorithms.

Do you really think the number of defective gaming GPUs that are good enough for mining is so high as to warrant making them mining GPUs?

I don't think so... considering how miners buy in bulk, there should be more than 50% defective ratio to even begin to have some sort of suply for the miners... Nah, this is just a PR lie from nvidia, as usual. Gamers are being mocked again.

 

[InvalidError]

Do you really think the number of defective gaming GPUs that are good enough for mining is so high as to warrant making them mining GPUs?

It costs Nvidia next to nothing to implement an extra chip bin and with fab yields being only around 70% last I heard, I have little doubt that there is a large enough reject rate to turn a decent profit on otherwise unusable dies.

That said, gamers are still ultimately screwed since mining cards having zero resale value means gaming GPUs with half the throughput (assuming miners find no viable work-around) but significant resale value may still be more cost-effective overall.

I don't think so... considering how miners buy in bulk, there should be more than 50% defective ratio to even begin to have some sort of suply for the miners...

It does not need to be anywhere near 50%. The incremental work to provide a mining-specific chip bin would likely already be profitable even at 5% of total otherwise-unusable dies since most of the manufacturing costs have already been incurred by the time dies get tested for binning.

 

[spongiemaster]

It costs Nvidia next to nothing to implement an extra chip bin and with fab yields being only around 70% last I heard, I have little doubt that there is a large enough reject rate to turn a decent profit on otherwise unusable dies.

That said, gamers are still ultimately screwed since mining cards having zero resale value means gaming GPUs with half the throughput (assuming miners find no viable work-around) but significant resale value may still be more cost-effective overall.

Does resale value really matter to massive mining operations? Do they ever actually sell the cards? If you got a couple thousand video cards to sell, you can't just drop them on ebay. Who are they offloading all these cards on? I would think these companies are in it for the long haul, and will continue mining whether it is profitable or not at that very moment, with the probably correct assumption that the value will go up over a long enough period of time.

Resale value only matters to the basement miners who have a couple cards. But if it isn't profitable to mine, and everyone is trying to dump their GPU's, the resale value is going to be pretty poor. If you spent twice MSRP on a card, and get well below MSRP selling during the bust, you're not going to be much ahead of the miner that bought a mining GPU that had twice the hash rate.

 

[InvalidError]

Resale value only matters to the basement miners who have a couple cards. But if it isn't profitable to mine, and everyone is trying to dump their GPU's, the resale value is going to be pretty poor.

If AMD and Nvidia continue raising MSRPs for relatively small gains at the low-end while mining continues guzzling much of the new GPU supply, I think there will be a fairly healthy second-hand market for 3060Ti and up for a good chunk of MSRP: thanks to current conditions, GTX1080s are still selling for $500+.