> I don't understand how this demand helps the gaming community.

It doesn't. This is just miners co-opting an old argument to gain sympathy.

Eh, it absolutely helps the Linux gaming community. Not so much the Windows one though

Removing LHR doesn't help Linux gamers at all. What would help is if they leaked the source code so people could patch nvidia's shitty drivers.

They modified the demand.

On Tuesday, Lapsus$ modified its demand. Now, the group also wants Nvidia to commit to making its GPU drivers completely open source. If Nvidia does not comply, Lapsus$ says, the company can expect to see a new leak that would include the complete silicon, graphics, and computer chipset files for all its recent GPUs:

So, NVIDIA, the choice is yours! Either:

–Officially make current and all future drivers for all cards open source, while keeping the Verilog and chipset trade secrets... well, secret

OR

–Not make the drivers open source, making us release the entire silicon chip files so that everyone not only knows your driver's secrets, but also your most closely-guarded trade secrets for graphics and computer chipsets too!

YOU HAVE UNTIL FRIDAY, YOU DECIDE!

Sounds like Nvidia just needs to patent its trade secrets until Friday, thus making them useless to everyone for the next 20 years when they'll be so outdated nobody will use them anyway. Regardless of what is released if the license doesn't allow anyone to use it it's effectively useless. Aside from maybe a few pirated driver builds that will fix some linux issues and also install background bitcoin miners.

I seriously doubt Nvidia will cave.

There's a reason why Nvidia hasn't already patented this stuff. Even if patents can't be directly copied, they can inspire the competition to do similar work.

Except no one professional would touch the leaked source with a 10 ft poll. Expect continued clean room reverse engineering or get sued.

Of course, a cleanroom procedure is a given in this case. History has shown that it is entirely possible though - see ReactOS for one very public example.

But also, not everyone cares. See game modders who routinely use source code leaks to make game patches. I'm not talking about big companies that want nvidia would want to sue, but individuals and small groups, who are not a big enough target and would likely remain anonymous anyways.

ReactOS isn't necessarily the best example: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20341933

That thread goes on to describe several very plausible reasons that a clean room implementation could have resulted in all of the coincidences the commenter pointed out.

Developers of the open source nouveau driver for nvidia GPUs certainly won't:

https://nitter.eu/_Lyude/status/1498811646697000961

I honestly don’t care about nouveau. It’s a fine project, but as a user I know it as the preinstalled software that cripples my servers until I install the proprietary drivers.

If nvidia releases the drivers as source-available rather than open source that would still be incredibly useful since you can distribute patches. Their drivers are still missing basic features like fan speed control on headless machines.

In my experience nouveau was way better than the proprietary drivers, which would crash a lot, while nouveau was stable. This was long ago though, maybe nvidia are better now.

I don't think you can distribute patches against proprietary source-available drivers, since modifying proprietary code is against copyright law.

Did you leave power savings enabled? Cause that’s a recipe for disaster on Linux. My ML servers have years of uptime with “nvidia-smi -pm 0” in crontab and auto updates disabled. The latter prevents the CUDA version from getting ahead of the kernel module version.

It’s a polished turd, but at least it works which is more than I can say for nouveau

And yes you can distribute patches. Copyright only prevents you from distributing the modified version.

This was like 15 years ago (no idea about power savings stuff), I wouldn't touch the proprietary driver any more though.

nouveau has been extremely stable for me when I used it up until last year.

Patches contain parts of the original code, so I would class them as modified versions of the original code. Also the initial modification isn't allowed either, I wasn't really referring to distribution of the patches, just creating them isn't allowed AFAIK.

You’re talking about the EULA, not the copyright license. The EULA can certainly claim you’re not allowed to do that, but it’s also unenforceable in most places so who cares?

I'm talking about neither the EULA nor the copyright license, but about copyright law, which doesn't allow modifications by default. Only a EULA or other license can then allow modifications.

OTOH, even the GPL is pretty much unenforceable these days, unless you are well funded enough to afford time consuming legal cases.

<https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lewis_Galoob_Toys,_Inc._v._N...>

Of course they will review it in their spare time. They wouldn’t copy it, but they could certainly learn insights and apply them in their architectures.

No, they won't. Any competitors and any open-source projects will advise their engineers to stay as far away from it as possible.

It's a clean-room engineering situation, if you've even looked at it you're legally contaminated and you're now a liability to the parent company/project's IP. And now those projects have to be hyper-aware of any contributors who might "sneak in" a bit of NVIDIA code that gets the whole project taken down.

https://nitter.eu/_Lyude/status/1498811646697000961

If they release Nvidia's code it can't really help Linux compatibility out without being an IP nightmare. Miners won't have a problem using it, though.

Not necessarily. There is no law against writing an implementation of the drivers as long as you don't copy the IP-protected code but only use knowledge about how the code works.

If you need to be on the safe side, the person writing the free code should never look at the IP-protected code but instead read a summary of the findings by someone else (clean room implementation).

It doesn’t even help miners really because the difficulty will just adjust. I don’t think these guys even understand the basics of what they do.

The only way I could see it helping is if they have all Nvidia cards and other people have some AMD lol.

It hurts the resale value of those cards for gamers. Hence in the long run, it will also keep gamers from upgrading that card as easily, because they will get less for their existing card.

It's a flimsy argument, but it's the only one I know so I figure that is what they meant.

I'm not even sure this is really miners, or just garden-variety ransomware/extortion hackers who are trying to co-opt several old arguments (first LHR, now open-source) to gain sympathy.

Even "we're doing this for the miners because we oppose artificial product segmentation!" is far more sympathetic than "we're doing this for ourselves, because we like money".

For a long lists of reasons; I don’t like DRMesque features like LHR and don’t like the crypto craze.

(And to be clear, cyber-extortion is clearly a criminal activity.)

BUT, I think the ”helping gamers” sounds a bit hollow.

What long list of reasons? LHR has absolutely zero impact on games. If anything, its presence was helping gamers because miners were at least somewhat put off buying LHR GPUs, making them more available to gamers.

"You don't own your hardware" is a very long list in my book.

By that metric you never did, and LHR doesn't change anything here. It's just yet another out of million optimizations baked into the drivers already, except this one is on BIOS level.

Ever heard of Code 43? Or the dozens of other software locks nvidia uses to be able to sell you essentially the same silicon at 4 wildly different price points? You never owned it and you won't now.

They were trying to make their products less attractive to people who were buying out their traditional customers. You aren't even going to own a GPU if they were all hoarded by "crypto" miners.

That isn’t anything game-specific, rather something that applies to anyone who bought an NVidia card.

It helps them in one dimension and harms them in another. I think the ridiculous scarcity and price mechanics of graphics cards right now is a way worse issue than drivers, and we can advocate to have that fixed. Doesn't matter if they fix the drivers while cards are still 2k+ because I won't be using them anyway.

> I don't understand how this demand helps the gaming community.

Agreed. But I don't understand how this helps the mining community, either.

Removing the LHR restriction would lead to a vast increase of the network hash rate, and consequently the difficulty would also increase, leading to lower rewards. The result would be that (1) non-LHR card owner's rewards go down significantly, and (2) LHR card owner's rewards probably wouldn't change much, perhaps even go down as well.

At least 80% of Nvidia GeForce cards sold since Summer 2021 have been LHR. That's a lot of hashing power locked up.

Yep, it’s the red queen’s race problem. If LHR is lifted, your hash rate will rise, but so will everyone else’s, so you are either (1) no better off or (2) worse off because other people may use this increased efficiency per chip to buy more chips, thus increasing their hash power proportionally. No one will ever decrease their hash power.

Won't your hash rate rise more than the average hash rate since not all cards are LHR cards?

Yes, your slice of the pie would improve more than the average slice, but the size of the overall pie would be much smaller.

At an individual level though, increasing the hash rate of your setup without impacting energy usage means more efficient mining (cheaper to run and faster to recoup investment). Long-term, the least efficienct miners get forced out until there is no profit to be had for the effort involved.

> increasing the hash rate of your setup without impacting energy usage means more efficient mining

No, it just means you get more MH/s. It's also (probably) not cheaper to run, unless the cards actually draw less power as well.

Whether that's cost-efficient or not depends on the reward. And with hundreds of TH/s suddenly being freed from LHR, your individual reward will all but certainly go down.

Yes, but no. The ransomers probably invested a considerable sum buying up every last used LHR card beforehand, so they'd stand to gain if Nvidia changed their policy. That's likely how they'll get caught.

If they had tons of LHR cards and the code to unlock them, the last thing they would do is share the unlock code with others (= the competition).

It's not like typing in a Faxanadu code. The ransomers are sitting on a mess of confidential information they lifted from Nvidia and they likely have zero clue how it all works. Keeping it to themselves was probably the original plan, but once they got a taste for how tragic engineering is behind the curtain their only chance for recuperating the investment became (1) forcing Nvidia to write the driver update for them; or (2) leak it and hope some open source developer volunteers.

The article is confusing. It has conflicting information (the hacker group seems to have released conflicting statements).

First, it's about LHR only.

> We want nvidia to push an update for all 30 series firmware that remove every lhr limitations otherwise we will leak hw folder. If they remove the lhr we will forget about hw folder (it's a big folder). We both know lhr impact mining and gaming

Later, it becomes about entirely open sourcing the drivers:

> So, NVIDIA, the choice is yours! Either:

> –Officially make current and all future drivers for all cards open source, while keeping the Verilog and chipset trade secrets... well, secret

Just sell more GPUs. Nvidia makes more money. We get more and better GPUs.

I'm not sure how this is bad.

So I take it you haven't tried to buy a 30-series GPU for gaming, then. It's impossible*, and that's because of mining*.

* Yeah, yeah, I know, supply chain this and pandemic demand that, but it's really mining that's the culprit.

I bought one the other day, no hassle from a local store. They had a pretty wide select of 30-series GPUs. The cost of electricity is high in Australia though, so it is certainly less economical to mine here.

Around here that's a rare story. Actually, I know nobody that did try this and succeeded. But then we don't have true offline retailers around here; those with offline stores sell most of their GPU stock in their online store at inflated prices. So I tend to chalk that up to survivorship bias ;-)

That's in Germany, we have some of the most expensive electricity in the world, and then the prices exploded since about 09/2021: Previously the cheapest offer was about 0.27€/kWh or maybe even 2c less if you're lucky; now we're at 0.35 to 0.45 for new contracts, depending on the region. I haven't checked the last few months (and especially not in the last week), but when I checked in early 12/2021 mining still netted some money (IIRC in the ballpark of 3 Euro/day/GPU).

Is it so? I looked up those GPUs at Russian online stores, and they are available for order, although the prices start from $1230 for RTX 3060.

If you think properly, it doesn't make sense to pay such a price just to kill some time playing games. A cheaper card would fit this purpose better.

Also I cannot blame the miners. If I am not missing something, currently a GPU mines cryptocurrency worth 50% of it cost per year (in countries with cheap electricity). I doubt you can get such percent in a bank deposit or other kind of investment.

$1230 for an RTX 3060 is absolutely insane, and is in no way a fair or reasonable price for that graphics card. The 3060 is supposedly a lower-mid range card, which have traditionally sold for closer to $300-400 (which is what the MSRP of that card is supposed to be).

By comparison, $1230 is over twice the MSRP of 2016's GTX 1080, which was a high end card at the time (and is roughly comparable spec-wise). It used to be that paying over $1000 for a graphics card got you the highest of the high end cards, not mid range stuff.

Obviously it's not just crypto miners raising this price. The chip shortage is real, there's been quite a bit of inflation since 2016, and PC gaming is more popular as it's ever been. But crypto miners are absolutely having an effect, and there's no real way to frame it as benefiting the average graphics card consumer.

Nvida should be able to meet market demand. You just don't like crypto maybe. If Tesla was out of Models 3s you would blame...? Or correctly assess that Tesla should ramp up production.

If con artists convinced speculative investors to spend millions of dollars on Tesla Model 3s, light them on fire, and dump them into the ocean, I would not blame Tesla for the reduced availability of Model 3s.

Tesla still got paid.

that's irrelevant to the point about demand

But thats not what he or she was responding to.

You realize it's not simple to just build the chip production facilities to facilitate this? It requires major capital investment and planning.

Looks like you also missed that the chip shortage is affecting automobiles. Many articles exist that can explain better than I can about why this isn't a quickly resolved issue.

It's not a supply issue.

By design, proof of work requires even more resources as more resources are spent on it. One might say that it expands to consume all available supply.

Because of that, no matter how many cards Nvidia makes, crypto miners will want them all, as long as there is money to be made in crypto.

Not true at all. If enough hardware is available, pool only expands until reward covers electricity cost plus small margin. I.e. bitcoin mining electricity-cost bound for the long time now.

Electricity costs plus cost of capital (etc).

in practice that's not even true because some miners are willing to run negative margins because they extract value elsewhere in the process

(the most prominent example is stolen electricity, but also for many miners it's a form of cash laundering. You always get less money out than you put in, but it's clean cash. In China's case they can't get money past capital controls, but you can mine at a loss and sell the bitcoins in a jurisdiction of your choice, that's worth something to them. Also, many miners are front-running exchange trades or extracting other forms of economic value.)

Interesting. How does running a mining operation help you front-run exchange trades?

standard front-running stuff. you can see the transactions that are in the mempool, you can either submit your own higher-fee transaction (likely to be included before theirs) or if you're a miner you can try to mine blocks with your transaction included and theirs specifically excluded so that yours goes first.

that essentially tells you that the price is about to go up or down, so you can make money on the movement.

https://cointelegraph.com/news/front-running-flash-bots-and-...

https://coinmarketcap.com/alexandria/glossary/miner-extracta...

Thanks.

Most of what you suggest doesn't benefit from having significant mining capacity yourself. (Though one thing does.)

There are limits to manufacturing capacity, especially such advanced manufacturing.

I feel like if Nvidia could, they would have scaled up. Why wouldn't they want to meet demand?

Uh, because you can inflate MSRP into the stratosphere and blame it on crypto miners?

Cryptocurrencies give NVIDIA the perfect bullshit excuse that people won't ponder too hard over, because the story of modern media is simplistic... every story must have a "good guy" and a "bad guy". It has to be dumbed down for all the idiotic plebs like us.

> Uh, because you can inflate MSRP into the stratosphere and blame it on crypto miners?

Cards are still selling for significantly more than MSRP, so if this was the plan they're doing a terrible job of it.

Nvidia doesn't make their own silicon, they go through TSMC's foundries, which means they're competing for a finite amount of production slots.

I thought their gaming line of 3000 chips is being produced at Samsung

Doesn't really matter. 3000 chips are on the cutting edge node and thus competiting with everything else that also wants to make chips on it.

It really is multi-modal market. And demand for that node, is different from automotive woes...

Seems that they are available? https://www.newegg.com/p/pl?N=100007709%20601357282

If you have been watching, this has literally changed in the last two weeks (also, compare those prices to MSRP). It's not a coincidence that this is happening at the same time that Ethereum moving to proof of stake has become real to people.

>It's impossible

There's plenty listed on sites like ebay or rakuten. It's definitely possible to buy. Else you can go buy it when it gets restocked somewhere else or go buy it at a physical store.

> There's plenty listed on sites like ebay or rakuten

If you ignore the 90% to 200% mark up price from scalpers, sure.

> Else you can go buy it when it gets restocked somewhere else or go buy it at a physical store.

Ah yes, how to forget the mystic websites that have stock for more than 30 secs or the physical store that you don't need to line hours before and be in 10 telegram channels to know that.

No? I can buy a 3080 and get it under a week from multiple vendors. Sure, it's expensive. It's not impossible though.

I think the argument is that driver source being open could help the (tiny!) Linux gaming community, but I agree. This is about mining.

Percentage wise it looks small but numbers are impressive. Monthly active steam users using Linux was reported at over 1 million last year https://www.gamingonlinux.com/steam-tracker/

That will easily double in the next year with the release of the $399 Steam Deck and accompanying Proton and Steam improvements. Linux is finally about to become a serious gaming platform. (No thanks to Nvidia)

Steam deck uses AMD GPUs though, so this wouldn't help.

But the improvements Valve is making to Steam, Proton, and other areas along with game developers paying more attention to Linux compatibility will benefit all Linux users, not just Steam Deck users, and make Linux a more popular gaming platform even among people with Nvidia PCs.

Yesterday I installed Steam on my Linux machine and downloaded a random game that has no Linux port and played it. It worked perfectly, just like Windows. It was amazing.

How is that relevant to Nvidia GPU source code?

As stated upthread, "the argument is that driver source being open could help the (tiny!) Linux gaming community", and the further argument that the community will be getting larger and not only because of people using Steam Deck hardware.

I see, makes sense.

it absolutely cannot, because no official developer is going near this with a 10,000 foot pole.

https://nitter.eu/_Lyude/status/1498811646697000961