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Bitcoin Hardware Games

NVIDIA Limits RTX 3060 Crypto Speeds As it Introduces Mining Cards (engadget.com) 161

Worried that the GeForce RTX 3060 will be sold out as cryptocurrency miners snap up every GPU in sight? NVIDIA thinks it has a simple way to help: make the new card unattractive to the crypto crowd. From a report: The company has revealed that it's cutting the hash rate (mining efficiency) of the RTX 3060 in half for Ethereum miners. The driver software can detect the Ethereum mining algorithm and throttle performance in response. The rationale is simple: NVIDIA wants to put GeForce cards "in the hands of gamers," not just those hoping to turn a profit by generating digital money. While the extremely high demand from miners has been good for NVIDIA's bottom line in the short term, it has frustrated gamers, professionals and everyday users who just want better than integrated graphics -- NVIDIA even brought back years-old GPUs just to give customers some options. Scalping and price gouging have been all too common for those GPUs that do become available.

It's not leaving miners empty-handed. The firm is launching a new CMP (Cryptocurrency Mining Processor) line of add-in cards that doesn't do graphics, but is fine-tuned for crypto mining performance. The absence of video ports allows for greater airflow and more densely-packed cards, for example. The first CMP designs are the 26 megahash per second 30HX and 36 megahash 40HX, both of which should be available this quarter from vendors like ASUS, EVGA and Gigabyte. More powerful 50X (45MH/s) and 90HX (86MH/s) boards are due in the second quarter.
The company said it won't limit the performance of GPUs that are already sold.
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NVIDIA Limits RTX 3060 Crypto Speeds As it Introduces Mining Cards

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  • Not cool (Score:5, Insightful)

    by sinij ( 911942 ) on Friday February 19, 2021 @09:38PM (#61081828)
    While I absolutely hate that miners buy out all the cards and make it hard to get one for gaming, I absolutely disagree that crippling cards like that for "undesirable" uses should be done. First it is going to be mining, then it is going to be non-EA games...
    • Exactly - it's all "general purpose computing" until the corporation, for whatever reason, decides that it's not.

      • It's a fucking driver update. Skip the stupid driver update then!

        Or run an open source driver.

        I thought Nvidia were utterly retarded for doing this in *software*, but apparently, they are not the only ones, so it might actually work! lol

    • Re:Not cool (Score:5, Insightful)

      by coolsnowmen ( 695297 ) on Friday February 19, 2021 @09:44PM (#61081848)
      nope. This is a company listening to it's long supportive customer base. A large group of gamers begging to get access to hardware, but can't because of an amoral market of people turning dinosaurs into money.
      • Re:Not cool (Score:5, Insightful)

        by sinij ( 911942 ) on Friday February 19, 2021 @09:57PM (#61081894)
        You can't solve the problem of mining this way. As a gamer, I would think you learn not to cast morality stones. How many times our past time was smeared this way? Have you learned nothing?! It is not up to us to tell what one can and cannot do with hardware. This is because someone easily use this event as a template for going after us. You don't have to think hard to imagine Nvidia getting pressured into crippling some smeared with *ism game in hardware as a result of cancel mob.

        Plus, we know cracked driver will be out in a week, with hundreds of millions on the table Nvidia simply doesn't have the brain power to stop this in software. Unless they put a trusted enclave with keys into actual hardware and demand signed drivers before showing any output.
        • Re:Not cool (Score:5, Insightful)

          by Ostracus ( 1354233 ) on Friday February 19, 2021 @10:24PM (#61081946) Journal

          Indeed. One could even flip the argument 180, from the miners point of view it's amoral that gamers are taking video cards away from them. It also makes gamers look entitled. Really the market is behaving the way it's suppose to be.

          • Re:Not cool (Score:5, Interesting)

            by larryjoe ( 135075 ) on Friday February 19, 2021 @11:34PM (#61082014)

            Indeed. One could even flip the argument 180, from the miners point of view it's amoral that gamers are taking video cards away from them. It also makes gamers look entitled. Really the market is behaving the way it's suppose to be.

            Nvidia is favoring gamers because that's the bulk of their sales, now, in the past, and likely in the future. If it were the other way around, then Nvidia would be favoring miners. The other incentive to segment the market is the historical devastation that sales of old miner cards has had on Nvidia (and AMD) sales in the future. Nvidia (and AMD) would be stupid to not address this miner "problem."

            • Nvidia is favoring gamers ...

              They are not favoring gamers because some gamers mined when their computer was idle. Similar story for some people used their GPUs for work. Mining allowed many games to "upgrade" their purchase to the next tier GPU, the mining subsidized things. Got that xx60 on a xx50 budget.

              Plus its not like modding firmware and installing mining friendly drivers is something alien to the "pro" miners.

              • by mysidia ( 191772 )

                Plus its not like modding firmware and installing mining friendly drivers is something alien to the "pro" miners.

                This is probably what will happen.. throttling hashrates in the driver does not eliminate mining - it excludes gamers and casual users from mining.

                The professionals who have serious money to be made are likely to find a workaround, resulting in more of the cards going to Pro miners possibly and maybe less interest in the cards by gamers and non-pro miners.. I mean: presumably it's in the c

            • Nvidia is favouring gamers because those products are aimed at gamers and normal consumers. Yes, it's a large part of their business, but they also have similar products targeted at AI applications that they charge a lot more for.

          • Re:Not cool (Score:4, Insightful)

            by doug141 ( 863552 ) on Saturday February 20, 2021 @12:19AM (#61082102)

            "Yes, the planet got destroyed. But for a beautiful moment in time, we created a lot of cryptocurrency."
            https://me.me/i/e-the-new-york... [me.me]

          • How is the market acting how it supposed to behave, if NVIDIA does not want miners buying their cards but they are still allowed to? This seems like a technical solution because the market is misbehaving.
          • Comment removed (Score:5, Interesting)

            by account_deleted ( 4530225 ) on Saturday February 20, 2021 @01:22AM (#61082260)
            Comment removed based on user account deletion
            • Historically gaming has been the market, but GPUs have likewise increased in capability not just from gamers asking for greater realism, but mining, and yes GPGPU related activities. Casting it as amoral because one wishes preferential treatment is "dumb". People don't cast CPU shortages this way, why should GPUs be the exception?

          • Markets never behave morally...

          • I dont see a problem with this, nvidia is simply splitting the market, because they fear that they alienate their oldest customer base by having to sell all the gpus to miners.
            I dont have any problem with that if it finally achieves that you can buy the cards finally in stores.
            Miners bought them by containers straight off the factories, and the few cards making it to the stores were gobbled up by scalpers mostly.
            Here in europe we have vendors who did not receive enough cards to fullfill the october backorde

          • I mean that's the morality of the markets, not the morality of the activity.

            Games: Release endorphins and provide a form of enjoyment in the player. Something essential for good mental health.
            Mining: Literally fucking up the environment for speculative investment that gives zero net benefit to society. Honestly I'd prefer these miners would instead open-cut mine paradise for uranium, at least then the world gets some benefit.

        • You can't solve the problem of mining this way.

          Watch me!

      • even if their products are, to be frank, great. This isn't listening to customers, it's an attack on AMD, who's been gaining a ton of market share because users will take any card they can get their hands on right now. Also AMD can't really do something like this as their open source Linux Drivers make it impractical if not impossible.

        This is also probably to stop a *huge* crash brewing if/when the miners dump those cards.

        That said I've got mixed feelings. Crypto is a huge waste and I cannot imagine
        • by dissy ( 172727 )

          Also AMD can't really do something like this as their open source Linux Drivers make it impractical if not impossible.

          Can the open source driver even access the cards at that low of a level?
          It's been over a year now since I looked. I suppose red hat throwing their weight behind the reverse engineering for the open source driver has made some serious impacts?

          It used to be that none of that hardware could be used without the blobs in the official driver. It's not really firmware per-se, but might as well be thought of similarly, since it had to be loaded to the cards ram.
          This necessitated using the closed driver with the s

        • This is also probably to stop a *huge* crash brewing if/when the miners dump those cards.

          I’d venture a guess that’s entirely what this is about. Nvidia is sick of the boom/bust cycle of crypto screwing with their bottom line. Every time crypto values take a dump, the graphics card market gets dragged down along with it.

          Having separate product lines for mining means there won’t be a bunch of used gaming cards sold at a loss on eBay, cannibalizing Nvidia’s sales.

        • i guess I see your point, if currency is to be manipulated for anyone's benefit, it should be the banking cartels and federal reserve doing it. But wouldn't one of the benefits of de-centralized finance be in the difficulty of manipulating a currency that no single group, or group of 'whales' have control over?

          But figure BTC is the first iteration, the downsides that it has aren't strictly speaking, required features of crypto. (shitty transaction speeds, extreme wastefulness in terms of energy to name the

          • The point is that you can't possibly stop that manipulation without a very, very powerful organization. i.e. a Democratic Government.

            Now, we can argue whether or not democracy is possible (I happen to think it is, but it's a complex machine and a fuck ton of work to maintain like any complex machine) but at the end of the day you need to figure out how to stop currency manipulation or the super rich are going to do it.


            One thing I've learned in my life is this: The House Always Wins. Better to not g
        • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

          by Powercntrl ( 458442 )

          The ideas the libertarian folks have aren't going to come to pass.

          I think you're confusing libertarians with folks who believe in "Star Trek" economics. Bitcoin is exactly what you get when you create a currency around libertarian beliefs. The network itself is controlled by those who already possess the wealth to buy and operate the mining hardware, the biggest profits are realized by those who are already wealthy and have money to gamble and/or manipulate the system, and there's no safeguards or oversight to the system. Get locked out of your wallet?, got scammed out

        • by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

          I wouldn't be surprised if hacked drivers came along sooner rather than later. Will require disabling driver signing on Windows to load them, but miners don't care about that.

        • by Cederic ( 9623 )

          This isn't listening to customers, it's an attack on AMD, who's been gaining a ton of market share because users will take any card they can get their hands on right now

          Wait? So selling a restricted card (that competes less effectively as a result) is an attack on the competitor selling to that market?

          I don't get that.

      • If only there were some way for legitimate gamers to "pre-order" one card. That might cut scalping by an order of magnitude without telling people what they can do with their property. Unfortunately the world is not ready for my advanced 1980's thinking.

        • by Kaenneth ( 82978 )

          Sell with and add to the price of every top end card a $100-$200 flexible gift card redeemable on your choice of Steam/Epic/MS Store/whatever other stores there are, instead of bundling specific games. Make the store client only accept the card's code from a system with that cards serial number installed.

      • Re:Not cool (Score:4, Insightful)

        by doug141 ( 863552 ) on Friday February 19, 2021 @11:11PM (#61081980)

        nope. This is a company listening to it's long supportive customer base. A large group of gamers begging to get access to hardware, but can't because of an amoral market of people turning dinosaurs into money.

        nope. This is Nvidia distracting you from their new crypto-only cards, which lack a video port and will never be sold to a gamer, not even secondhand. That's GPU silicon lost to gaming, forever.

        • GPGPU doesn't need a video port.

        • by Misagon ( 1135 )

          I believe that what nVidia is actually doing is a type of "binning" [wikipedia.org].

          On each wafer of silicon manufactured, there will be some chips that did not turn out as well as others. This is actually very common.
          Those with defects in only some of their units will have those shut off permanently (with fuses) during testing and binned as lower-tier GPUs sold for lower prices. For example, the 1080, 1070TI and 1070 all have the same chip: the GP104, but with different binning.

          Similarly, those chips that have defects onl

      • nope. This is a company listening to it's long supportive customer base. A large group of gamers begging to get access to hardware, but can't because of an amoral market of people turning dinosaurs into money.

        Real miners use ASICs, not graphics cards.

        Only idiots buy graphics cards hoping to mine anything. They won't be missed, they're not paying their own electricity bills anyway.

        • by Luckyo ( 1726890 )

          True for some crypto like bitcoin, false for other like ether.

          Ether designers specifically aimed to cripple ASICs by requiring fairly low computational power and massive memory bandwidth. You can still build an ASIC for it. It just won't really be that much better than a GPU. All while not being resellable and having no way to be priced significantly more cheap than GPUs because fast memory is expensive.

      • Mining software will circumvent the driver restrictions. Meanwhile nVidia has signaled that they are willing to restrict consumer dGPUs as compute devices even further than they already are (you already get slow FP64).

      • No, pretending to listen. Fixing a deliberate bug like this in a driver is trivial. There would be a workarounds immediately. And besides xx60 cards generally weren't the best for crypto, so it is all just marketing.

      • "...of an amoral market of people turning dinosaurs into money."

        So nearly everybody, everywhere, all the time?

    • Did you read the last line of the fucking summary?
    • Please. It's always something isn't it? There's always a nefarious motive behind any move. Well I have news for you, Nvidia has already been throttling their cards since forever. Their Quadro professional cards are just normal gamer cards with drivers that unlock the cards full potential. Imagine! All these past decades Nvidia could have potentially throttled "non-EA" games and you haven't been worrying about it. You got some gut wrenching anxiety to catch up on.

    • Re:Not cool (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Bert64 ( 520050 ) <bert AT slashdot DOT firenzee DOT com> on Friday February 19, 2021 @09:53PM (#61081880) Homepage

      Once cards become unprofitable for mining, they get sold off cheaply. These older cards are still perfectly good for playing games, and very few if any games actually require the latest cards.

      I agree with you however, artificially crippling something is never good.

      • by sinij ( 911942 )
        I never tried purchasing post-mining card, but I heard that a year or so of 24/7 100% load makes them unreliable. I can't immediately think what would go, but they are not exactly using server-grade hardware for these boards.
        • by doug141 ( 863552 ) on Friday February 19, 2021 @11:16PM (#61081986)

          Miners undervolt them to save power. You can get 95% of the performance at 60% of the power. Mining cards are more reliable than a gamer's overclocked secondhand card.

        • That is completely incorrect, but it was a common belief. The reality is quite the opposite:

          Mining cards are run at constant loads and do not suffer from large temperature swings and thermal shocks that a typical gaming machine subjects them to.
          Mining cards are on all the time, not constantly powered up and down subjected to wild voltage swings as they go (typically powered on devices last longer than those power cycled).
          Mining cards are often run in open air rigs and are not subjected to the same high temp

      • by doug141 ( 863552 )

        Once cards become unprofitable for mining, they get sold off cheaply. These older cards are still perfectly good for playing games,

        Not Nvidia's new crypto-only cards, which are the other half of this announcement. They lack a video port. That silicon is lost to gaming forever.

        • by Luckyo ( 1726890 )

          They also garbage tier binning chips that would be unsuitable for any of the existing SKUs of GPUs, so they were "lost to gaming forever" during manufacturing process.

          This is nvidia finding a way to sell "recycle" materials unsuitable for GPUs for profit. Just look at power limits and performance at those power levels in the specs. They're utterly horrible.

          • by Megane ( 129182 )
            If that's true, then why would they try to charge more for an absurd profit on a crypto card, instead of making the price more attractive to buy a graphics card? It seems to me if they really cared about gamers, they would give cryptards an incentive to not buy graphics cards, instead of forcing it with DRM. (But yeah, I know, there probably wouldn't be enough crypto cards anyhow, cryptards would buy up any amount that Nvidia could produce.)
            • by Luckyo ( 1726890 )

              Because they still return positive on the "cost vs benefit" formula for ether miners, and because miners are already buying and stealing everything that they can their hands on.

              This is simply surplus supply to offer them.

            • Because crypto miners will pay more for those cards. Same reason they charge more for Quadro cards that are essentially the same hardware as the gaming GPUs but with better drivers.
    • I absolutely disagree that crippling cards like that for "undesirable" uses should be done. First it is going to be mining, then it is going to be non-EA games...

      I think you are projecting your dystopian fantasies ad absurdum.

      • by sinij ( 911942 )

        I think you are projecting your dystopian fantasies ad absurdum.

        I know you just woke up from a coma, but a lot of thing happened in 2020.

    • miners buy out all the cards and make it hard to get one for gaming

      Or you could say that NVIDIA created the shortage by setting the price of those cards below market equilibrium.

      They should just auction them on eBay with a starting price of $1 each until the fury subsides and they can sell them through retail channels at the advertised price.

    • First it is going to be mining, then it is going to be non-EA games...

      Asserting the right to be angry if and when when GPU performance is nerfed in non-EA games is a strawman. This is why every slippery slope argument could be modded offtopic.

      Back to the matter at hand: Nvidia is announcing the nerfing of mining in their GPU line to distract you from the fact they are going to be diverting GPU silicon to their new mining-only cards, which have no video port. This entire line will never see a gamers PC, not even when the miners sell them off. Nvidia is shrinking the supply of

      • You are an idiot. Do you think there's a limited supply of silicon? If the crypto line does well we'll see factories devoted to that. Meanwhile it's in Nvidia's best interest to make a card for each gamer who can pay $1 more than they cost to make.
    • Don't forget that it would open an industry for ways to "bypass it", which in truth is malware. And when someone does find a way to make the card harvest at full efficacy with firmware patches NVIDIA will burst into tears and beg Google to de-list the sites which catapults the ones that are malware to the top.

      See: Daz Windows Loader, search that on Google and you don't get the real one on MyDigitalLife until several results later. Everything above it is malware.

    • Slippery slope fallacy. Right now this lets gamers buy cards instead of just miners and should vastly accelerate the development of Nvidia open-source drivers, sounds like a win-win to me...

    • While I absolutely hate that miners buy out all the cards and make it hard to get one for gaming, I absolutely disagree that crippling cards like that for "undesirable" uses should be done.

      The problem is some people that use their GPUs for "legitimate" reasons also mine when the computer is idle. It sort of subsidizes the cost of the GPU. It can make a xx60 affordable on a xx50 budget. Oh well, guess I'll get the 3050 rather than the 3060.

    • While I absolutely hate that miners buy out all the cards and make it hard to get one for gaming, I absolutely disagree that crippling cards like that for "undesirable" uses should be done. First it is going to be mining, then it is going to be non-EA games...

      This is totally wrong. Nvidia isn't like a court of law. They do not need to create a precedent of crippling cards for one reason so that they can start going after non-EA titles. If they do actually start crippling no-EA games, then by all means come back and complain because it would be a totally anti-gamer move.

      Do you know what isn't an anti-gamer move? Preventing the crypto crowd from grabbing all the cards so that gamers can't buy one at a sensible price! The whole price problem of graphics cards is th

    • Quadro cards have done the same thing for years and years already....

      Those that run Plex or other media stream services know the non Quadro cards, you're limited to only two transcode sessions are once on GeForce cards, but unlimited on Quadro.. not because of performance, but driver lockouts. They want you to buy higher end cards for that...

    • by tlhIngan ( 30335 )

      While I absolutely hate that miners buy out all the cards and make it hard to get one for gaming, I absolutely disagree that crippling cards like that for "undesirable" uses should be done. First it is going to be mining, then it is going to be non-EA games...
      Flag as Inappropriate

      Chances are, it's just a temporary measure - it's all software after all. And right now miners and gamers are competing against each other for cards due to chip shortages. Once the cards are more readily available, nVidia can easil

    • by MrL0G1C ( 867445 )

      The problem is this creates more waste and it restricts the number of GPUs in use and of course this benefits nVidia.

      If miners buy a mining GPU that can't be used for gaming then when the cryptocurrency price stabilises / or the when the mining difficulty rises enough then their mining card becomes worthless. If it's worthless then it'll become landfill, is that what we want - cards bought to mine for a few months and then chucked away?

      So if you're a miner then you'll want to be using a card which can mine

    • They've done this for years with their Quadro range: the GeForce is crippled so far as for the kind of CAD workloads Quadro is marketed for. If you want a CAD card, you buy Quadro, not GeForce. Now they're doing similar for crypto: if you want a crypto mining card, buy a crypto mining card. Likewise editions of Windows like Home lack stuff present in Pro and so on, and similar for much software. It might be heavy handed in some people's eyes, but how else are the intended market for GeForce cards (gamers) g

    • by GuB-42 ( 2483988 )

      It is market segmentation, and most companies do that.
      - Nvidia with Quadro
      - Intel with Xeon
      - AMD with Radeon Pro / Epyc

      These are all "enterprise grade" hardware, that is essentially the uncrippled version of the consumer variants (GeForce, Core, Radeon/Ryzen). The transport industry charges some timeslots and flexible tickets much higher because people those want these (usually companies) are ready to pay more.

      As for EA games, GPU manufacturers are already working with large studios to have their games spec

  • by Roger W Moore ( 538166 ) on Friday February 19, 2021 @09:58PM (#61081898) Journal
    It seems that they have a very strange business model if their response to a sustained surge in demand is to make their product less attractive to a large fraction of their customers. What happened to increasing the supply of cards to meet that demand? I realize that you can't do that to meet a short-term blip in demand but the demand from miners has been sustained and growing for years now.
    • It seems that they have a very strange business model if their response to a sustained surge in demand is to make their product less attractive to a large fraction of their customers. What happened to increasing the supply of cards to meet that demand? I realize that you can't do that to meet a short-term blip in demand but the demand from miners has been sustained and growing for years now.

      My guess is they see the gaming demand more sustainable long term vs mining and do nor want to cede that market. This allows the to the production on gamers plus charge miners a premium since will pay it. Plus, if they can make mining cards less desirable for gamers the second hand market for them is a lot less of a threat to them. As a result, there is no need to invest in more capacity and risk it going unused at some point.

    • Comment removed based on user account deletion
    • by vix86 ( 592763 )

      What happened to increasing the supply of cards to meet that demand? I realize that you can't do that to meet a short-term blip in demand but the demand from miners has been sustained and growing for years now.

      Wrong. The last time this happened and Nvidia tried to play the market with guessing how the demand would stay, they got burned.

      Crypto-mining crash leaves Nvidia with 'excess' inventory of Pascal cards [pcgamer.com]

      Miners only offer supply when the crypto market is ballooned, like it is now, and then once that's gone, the demand vanishes.

      Its even worse this time around since everyone is leaning on Samsung and TMSC for chips, so there isn't any extra headroom to expand the supply into. Nvidia is making chips as fast as po

    • It seems that they have a very strange business model if their response to a sustained surge in demand is to make their product less attractive to a large fraction of their customers.

      They aren't. They are making the product less attractive to a small fraction of their customers, but unfortunately customers who bulk buy now while then flooding the market with second hand junk in 6 months which causes a double whammy of pissed off primary customers who then proceed to not buy your product when you do get a chance to catch up.

      It's not at all strange to limit supply to an uncharacteristically large sink of demand that doesn't drive your primary business.

  • Torvalds was right.

    • by Mal-2 ( 675116 )

      He often is, he's just less than diplomatic about expressing it. He's pretty much a textbook example of the "Jerkass Has A Point" trope.

  • As someone who games, but also sets his computer to mine when not gaming, this irks me. Seems to me that retailers limiting the number of cards per customer is the better solution.

    • Unless you’ve got a large PV system on your roof, or have an extremely inexpensive electrical utility, you’re essentially just buying coins at the current market rate - billed to your power bill. Small scale hobbyist mining became unprofitable once China joined the game.

  • Wasn't Ethereum supposed to convert to Proof Of Stake (from Proof Of Work) and stop this hashing crap? Like several years ago?

    • It's a slow process. They launched ETH 2.0 in 2020 which is their first meaningful step towards PoS. PoW is seen as wasteful by any responsible crypto project. For now, Ethereum has a "beacon" chain that features PoS and "shard" chains that feature PoW. Not sure how long it will take them to eliminate PoW entirely.

      • I don't think it matters if they do. ETH only became popular because BitCoin was taken over by ASICs and people who had a lot of GPUs wanted some way to use them. PoS is better from a lot of perspectives but the same group of people with a lot of GPUs are going to want something to use them on.
  • What a stupid waste of resources.

  • The article says Nvidia is also coming out with a line of crypto-only cards... no video port. These cards will not see a second life being sold off to a gamer. They just take silicon out of the maker-to-gamer pipeline, and use it to waste energy on the latest ponzi scheme.

    • If they do it smart, these crypto only cards are the low bin silicon that couldn't make a 3060 and would just be trashed. They can then make a profit off the stuff that would have been canned.

  • by doug141 ( 863552 ) on Friday February 19, 2021 @11:07PM (#61081968)

    The article says they are releasing cypto-only cards with no video port. These cards are diverting GPU silicon from the maker-to-gamer pipepline to the mining pipeline, and they are never coming back.

    • These cards are diverting GPU silicon from the maker-to-gamer pipepline to the mining pipeline

      That is senseless speculation at best.

      a) You have no knowledge of who will be producing these cards.
      b) They aren't running the same silicon, and as such may have very different performance requirements / yields.

      This is very likely doing the exact opposite of what you think and optimising supply such that gamers can actually get cards and miners can get *different* silicon with different manufacturing to do their mining. There's more than one fab in the world.

  • This is ridiculous. If I am finally able to score a card after trying for months, the last thing I want is to be crippled on what I can and cannot do with it because NVidia has decided for me.

    Right now, I game AND I'm using my card to mine and pay for itself. It's not just the big guys who mine. This is the most hairbrained thing I've seen a company come out with : "We're going to limit our card to those who have the disposable cash to afford the card and aren't going to seek to use mining to recoup the cos

    • What you are doing was one of the earliest (and best) use cases for PoW. A limited amount of hardware per miner, scoring a little dosh on the side thanks to minimal levels of technical knowledge. And in the process you helped secure an innovative and new blockchain technology for bigger players by keeping it decentralized.

      PoW's greatest flaw was that it didn't stay that way. If it did, we wouldn't be having this problem. NV is short-sightedly helping guarantee that PoW will continue to consolidate into

  • I thought the GPU era was over and that ASICs were the way to go? Why are people still buying inefficient GPUs for that purpose?

  • Comment removed based on user account deletion

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