Mining Restricted on Nvidia's RTX-3060 Graphics Card
Nvidia has issued an update for it 3060 graphics cards in order to limit the maximum mining capacity on these cards.
Nvidia has revealed that it would lock new cards by reducing mining capacity by 50% after unintentionally unlocking its own hash rate limiter in a driver update.
In an attempt to prevent cryptocurrency miners, Nvidia is secretly reintroducing a hash rate limiter on its RTX 3060 series graphics cards.
The company released the GeForce 466.27 driver recently, which reintroduces the RTX 3060 crypto mining limiter.
Nvidia will introduce new "Lite Hash Rate" models soon, according to sources published by computer news site VideoCardz, which will be nearly identical to previous versions of these cards.
The gaming giant had previously restricted the hash on previous versions, resulting in a 50% reduction in mining results. Previously, Nvidia's head of global GeForce marketing, Matt Wuebbling, wrote on his blog that GeForce GPUs were created with gamers in mind, and they are demanding more.
Hackers devised a workaround, and in March, a driver update unintentionally activated this limiter, allowing the card to mine Ether (ETH) and other cryptocurrencies at its full capacity of 118 mega hashes per second.
The new cards are said to be similar to the old ones in every way except for the PCI Device ID, which will be 2504. Despite the fact that the public now has access to the unlocked driver, the new ID is programmed to make it useless when used with the 470.05 driver update. Any miners would almost certainly try to get around this, and previous versions were said to be hard-locked through the BIOS.
The gaming community has had a mixed reaction to the news. According to Eric W of the VideoCardz forum, the move just appears to marginalize small-scale home miners, who are often gamers. He said, he would like to upgrade his graphics card for gaming, but he also mines when he is not playing games. Now he is unable to purchase a mining GPU because Nvidia only appears to sell them in quantities of several thousand, and he has no desire to own a large number of mining rigs.
The limiter wouldn't discourage miners anyway, according to user Mark. He added that it needs to be more than 90% to be a real deterrent to miners, while Mashed Potato believes it's just a money grab and their real purpose is to make miners buy their cards twice as much.
Limits are supposed to be set on most RTX 30 series cards, according to VideoCardz, but some models, such as the RTX 3090, may not get one due to its high price tag of $1,500.