Nvidia announces mining GPUs, cuts the hash rate of RTX-3060 in half

Re:Nvidia announces mining GPUs, cuts the hash rate of RTX-3... by arsome on Thursday February 18, 2021 @04:52PM (#26186175)

Sounds like it's time to crack some NVIDIA drivers. I already do it for the video encoding limitations, why not this too? Miners are willing to go to some really hacky extremes, reflashing firmwares, custom fan mods, extreme overclock configurations, etc to maximize hashrates and certainly won't care if they have to jump through some hoops to patch a specific version of the Linux driver or enable unsigned drivers on Windows, as long as they make more profit.

Good luck with this one NVIDIA but you're playing a losing game. As soon as one un-restricted version of the driver exists, this is as good as useless and demand will be the same as ever for these cards unless they're able to ship CMP cards at a very high rate, but my understanding is the restriction here is silicon.

Let's not forget that last time they produced "mining only" cards, people managed to crack the drivers to render graphics too... this is no exception.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TY4s35uULg4

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Re:Nvidia announces mining GPUs, cuts the hash rate of RTX-3... by jsheard on Thursday February 18, 2021 @05:40PM (#26186792)

Someone with early access to 3060 hardware, but not access to the launch drivers managed to wrangle it into working on pre-3060 drivers and still found that mining performance was artificially reduced. It starts high then falls off after a minute or so when some heuristic decides that mining is happening.

https://videocardz.com/newz/zotac-geforce-rtx-3060-early-gpu...

There's speculation that the limiter might actually live in the cards VBIOS, which is much harder to modify than the driver as newer Nvidia cards require a signed VBIOS to boot.

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Re:Nvidia announces mining GPUs, cuts the hash rate of RTX-3... by Teknoman117 on Thursday February 18, 2021 @08:24PM (#26188319)

I'm really curious about how they got the card working without the specific drivers for it.

I'm also curious if this "mining detection" is going to kick in "accidentally" on other compute loads. It would be really crappy if the CUDA performance of these cards is bad because they don't want miners using them.

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Re:Nvidia announces mining GPUs, cuts the hash rate of RTX-3... by qqii on Thursday February 18, 2021 @10:38PM (#26189371)

If you watch the Russian source video he seems to somehow install Nividia's drivers selecting 3070.

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Re:Nvidia announces mining GPUs, cuts the hash rate of RTX-3... by hinoki on Thursday February 18, 2021 @05:50PM (#26186919)

So we’ll see mod chips for GPUs soon?

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Re:Nvidia announces mining GPUs, cuts the hash rate of RTX-3... by Answerawake on Thursday February 18, 2021 @07:02PM (#26187624)

YES! I hope so if only to feel like I am back in the scene for just a moment. Miss those days. Maybe they can mod the VBIOS to show the crack group's logo on bootup just like how old VGA cards would show some company text before handing off to the PC.

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Re:Nvidia announces mining GPUs, cuts the hash rate of RTX-3... by Const-me on Thursday February 18, 2021 @07:45PM (#26187994)

> old VGA cards would show some company text before handing off to the PC

My Gigabyte motherboard is doing that. Ain’t too old, has AMD’s X570 chipset.

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Re:Nvidia announces mining GPUs, cuts the hash rate of RTX-3... by happynacho on Thursday February 18, 2021 @10:24PM (#26189249)

Well, that's the motherboard, not the videocard. Every motherboard does it.

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Re:Nvidia announces mining GPUs, cuts the hash rate of RTX-3... by remexre on Thursday February 18, 2021 @11:16PM (#26189643)

Yep, that's through the BGRT, which is part of ACPI. I'm not actually sure if a GPU could export one to the BIOS, but I assume not.

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Re:Nvidia announces mining GPUs, cuts the hash rate of RTX-3... by im3w1l on Friday February 19, 2021 @02:18AM (#26190557)

The connection to the monitor is physically located on the video card. So the gpu could display whatever it wants without asking or coordinating with the motherboard.

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Re:Nvidia announces mining GPUs, cuts the hash rate of RTX-3... by codezero on Thursday February 18, 2021 @07:34PM (#26187888)

Or the CMP line will actually fit the needs, and no need for games of whack a mole.

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Re:Nvidia announces mining GPUs, cuts the hash rate of RTX-3... by Teknoman117 on Thursday February 18, 2021 @08:22PM (#26188289)

It basically depends on three things though. The CMP card supply needs to be sufficient for the miners' demand, they can't be more expensive, and the question of how much does being able to resell the cards to gamers play into the value proposition.

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Re:Nvidia announces mining GPUs, cuts the hash rate of RTX-3... by UseStrict on Thursday February 18, 2021 @11:31PM (#26189764)

I actually avoid the used video card market now, the resale price is insanely high and odds are the card was driven as hard as possible for months at a time mining crypto before being swapped out for the latest and greatest.

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Re:Nvidia announces mining GPUs, cuts the hash rate of RTX-3... by jsheard on Friday February 19, 2021 @12:26PM (#26195435)

Follow-up: Bryan Del Rizzo from Nvidia says the limiter involves the cards firmware: https://twitter.com/bdelrizzo/status/1362619264423747590

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Re:Nvidia announces mining GPUs, cuts the hash rate of RTX-3... by qqii on Thursday February 18, 2021 @10:38PM (#26189364)

I don't speak Russian but the source video shows him force installing Nividia's drivers and selecting 3070.

Pure speculation but I'd imagine that Nividia's drivers can properly differentiate and already had the limitation in the current release.

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Re:Nvidia announces mining GPUs, cuts the hash rate of RTX-3... by MPSimmons on Friday February 19, 2021 @01:04AM (#26190245)

Does this also happen during machine learning workloads?

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Re:Nvidia announces mining GPUs, cuts the hash rate of RTX-3... by herendin2 on Thursday February 18, 2021 @11:13PM (#26189612)

Nvidia is effectively incentivizing the cracking of their driver and firmware security signing with millions of dollars. Because a person who cracks it can build a more profitable mining farm

It's a sort of accidental bug bounty and I wonder if Nvidia have really thought this through?

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Re:Nvidia announces mining GPUs, cuts the hash rate of RTX-3... by Tepix on Friday February 19, 2021 @07:17AM (#26192325)

If you crack it, you haven't found a bug though. You managed to do a bit of circumvention.

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Re:Nvidia announces mining GPUs, cuts the hash rate of RTX-3... by herendin2 on Friday February 19, 2021 @02:23PM (#26196924)

I'd see locked firmware as a bug. Nvidia probably wouldn't agree.

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Re:Nvidia announces mining GPUs, cuts the hash rate of RTX-3... by undersuit on Saturday February 20, 2021 @01:00AM (#26202006)

Plenty of Nvidia Linux users will accept the "patch" regardless I think.

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Re:Nvidia announces mining GPUs, cuts the hash rate of RTX-3... by Strom on Thursday February 18, 2021 @07:20PM (#26187773)

Indeed, I remember when I was doing some mining early in bitcoin's history. I had custom hacked BIOS on my AMD cards to be able to overclock beyond regular power limits. This flashing was possible only due to an exploit of the BIOS signature verification.

Given that I was doing this as only a rather casual miner with three GPUs, I have no doubt that this new restriction will be attacked ruthlessly.

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Re:Nvidia announces mining GPUs, cuts the hash rate of RTX-3... by tus89 on Thursday February 18, 2021 @05:10PM (#26186393)

Is it even in theory possible to produce silicon that does not perform well on crypto operations while allows 3D to run at full speed? Or do they simply rely on the same underlying operations?

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Re:Nvidia announces mining GPUs, cuts the hash rate of RTX-3... by leetcrew on Thursday February 18, 2021 @05:15PM (#26186475)

wouldn't hashing be mostly int operations, while 3D graphics would be FP32? I dunno if they still do this, but nvidia used to artificially limit the rate for other float widths on geforce parts to segment the market.

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Re:Nvidia announces mining GPUs, cuts the hash rate of RTX-3... by monocasa on Friday February 19, 2021 @12:55AM (#26190205)

There's plenty of integer ops in games these days. They do pretty arbitrary computation in compute shaders.

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Re:Nvidia announces mining GPUs, cuts the hash rate of RTX-3... by Average_ on Thursday February 18, 2021 @09:20PM (#26188756)

> I already do it for the video encoding limitations, why not this too?

That sounds pretty interesting. Mind elaborating on what changes you achieve with your modifications?

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Re:Nvidia announces mining GPUs, cuts the hash rate of RTX-3... by arsome on Thursday February 18, 2021 @10:21PM (#26189231)

https://github.com/keylase/nvidia-patch

Basically just lets my Plex server transcode more streams at once without having a Quadro.

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Re:Nvidia announces mining GPUs, cuts the hash rate of RTX-3... by canada_dry on Friday February 19, 2021 @12:24AM (#26190066)

> my Plex server transcode more streams at once

And... why do you need your Plex server transcoding multiple streams? Just curious!

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Re:Nvidia announces mining GPUs, cuts the hash rate of RTX-3... by arsome on Friday February 19, 2021 @12:41AM (#26190145)

I've got many users on it and 3 or 4 simultaneous streams is not an uncommon occurrence. Nvenc is artificially limited to 2 on consumer cards.

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Re:Nvidia announces mining GPUs, cuts the hash rate of RTX-3... by crtasm on Friday February 19, 2021 @01:57PM (#26196582)

Thought I was reading https://developer.nvidia.com/video-encode-and-decode-gpu-sup... wrong but turns out they raised the limit to 3 last year.

https://techgage.com/news/nvidia-bumps-nvenc-stream-limit-on...

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Re:Nvidia announces mining GPUs, cuts the hash rate of RTX-3... by zokier on Thursday February 18, 2021 @07:26PM (#26187827)

Its not question if miners can/will crack it at some point (yes, they can). Question is how many miners will order the cards on day 0 without knowing if they can be used? The intention here is only to deter them enough that gamers have at least slightly better chance of getting these cards, and especially for launch-day orders.

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Re:Nvidia announces mining GPUs, cuts the hash rate of RTX-3... by leshenka on Thursday February 18, 2021 @07:39PM (#26187948)

I guess as long as mining shitcoins on a gpu is profitable we will have the gpu supply problem.

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Re:Nvidia announces mining GPUs, cuts the hash rate of RTX-3... by dheera on Thursday February 18, 2021 @05:45PM (#26186882)

Maybe it's time to create an adversarial network that can figure out how to mine on the GPU without causing it to halve the hash rate, train that network on an NVIDIA GPU, and shove it to them.

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Re:Nvidia announces mining GPUs, cuts the hash rate of RTX-3... by 0-_-0 on Friday February 19, 2021 @05:23AM (#26191484)

That's not how adversarial networks work

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