NVIDIA releases CMP lineup and reduces hashing rates on GeForce cards

[Guest]

Summary

With the launch of the RTX 3060 approaching on Feb. 25, NVIDIA wants to deter crypto miners from purchasing up all of the new cards by introducing an entirely new lineup of processors, which they call "Cryptocurrency Mining Processors." They're also using their drivers to limit the hash rate when mining-type algorithms are being run on the new RTX card. This is in an effort to differentiate between their gaming series of cards and cards meant for miners.

 

Quotes

Quote

RTX 3060 software drivers are designed to detect specific attributes of the Ethereum cryptocurrency mining algorithm, and limit the hash rate, or cryptocurrency mining efficiency, by around 50 percent.

To address the specific needs of Ethereum mining, we’re announcing the NVIDIA CMP, or, Cryptocurrency Mining Processor, product line for professional mining.

CMP products — which don’t do graphics — are sold through authorized partners and optimized for the best mining performance and efficiency. They don’t meet the specifications required of a GeForce GPU and, thus, don’t impact the availability of GeForce GPUs to gamers.

Quote

In this case, NVIDIA is altering the drivers for the GeForce RTX 3060 to "detect specific attributes of the Ethereum cryptocurrency mining algorithm" when miners attempt to use the cards. When the drivers detect these patterns being utilized, the software will automatically limit the hash rate by roughly 50 percent, negating any usefulness of deploying the card for mining.

My thoughts

I think this is a step in the right direction, but isn't going to do much to solve the scalping issues that have plagued previous 30-series launches. I'm not familiar with how locked down drivers are on these cards or how often this sort of thing happens, but it's possible that the mining community will develop their own drivers and buy up the GeForce cards anyway. 

 

Sources

https://blogs.nvidia.com/blog/2021/02/18/geforce-cmp/

https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/cmp/

https://hothardware.com/news/nvidia-geforce-rtx-3060-availability-crypto-mining-cmp-gpu

https://www.pcgamer.com/nvidia-cmp-mining-cards-rtx-3060-half-hash-rate/

https://www.anandtech.com/show/16493/nvidia-launches-cmp-dedicated-mining-hardware

https://www.theverge.com/circuitbreaker/2021/2/18/22290362/nvidia-will-not-reduce-3060-ti-3070-3080-3090-eth-mining

 

[Tristerin]

Incoming Chinese drivers to circumvent in t-minus 3...2...

[Levent]

A desperate solution. Unless they plan on releasing new GPUs (that don't have drivers already) this won't have any significant impact on current cards.

[Drama Lama]

spoiler: it won't help

[porina]

That's a very interesting strategy. My first thought was simply, you can get around it by rolling back to older drivers? If they're just applying this to 3060, which hasn't launched yet, I guess that is possible, but this wouldn't work for existing released models. This assumes there is no "wild" 3060 driver. If press has release driver, is that baked in also?

 

There's also another concern about this approach. I'm not a fan in principle of crippling. I get the reasons why in this case, but could there be unintended effects for people who use GPU for compute but not mining? What if it interferes with your video editing performance for example? Or folding@home? They have to make it targeted enough towards Eth mining so that it can't be worked around by changing the mining code, but not so wide other uses are impacted also. Unless nvidia wants to make the 3060 strictly only a gaming GPU.

 

It'll be interesting to see how this plays out.

[CTR640]

Nope, this won't help at all. Reverting back to older drivers is damn easy so this is a very weak "solution". It has to be hardware-limited.

[Sauron]

It's about time they differentiated their product lines (should have done so years ago) but I really don't like it being a software limit, people are 1) just going to run older drivers on existing cards and 2) find a way to bypass it immediately. Plus it could end up hurting other use cases that are incorrectly identified as mining.

 

The solution needs to be hardware based.

[WereCat]

Sooo, use older drivers?

[flibberdipper]

Leave it to Nvidia to half-ass a fix for GPU shortages.

[Spotty]

6 minutes ago, itswillum said:

They don’t meet the specifications required of a GeForce GPU and, thus, don’t impact the availability of GeForce GPUs to gamers.

I wonder if this means there won't be a Super series this time around, since last generation super cards were mostly the next GPU up in the series that didn't quite meet the spec. (Like the 2070 super was a 'bad' 2080 gpu). If they can just dump the poorly binned dies as mining GPUs they don't really need a Super series to get rid of them. 

 

Considering they're nerfing the 3060 mining performance I'm thinking it would have actually been really good at mining. 

[SADS]

yeh, two things come to mind.

One is that, as mentioned before, people will just hack the drivers.

But I thought that these 'specialist' miner cards were of zero value to miners anyway because they have limited resale value.

 

Miners just buy up all the GPUs because they hold the value far greater when they are replaced by the next generation.

[SFFDesigns]

They shouldn't nerf mining performance on the consumer cards imo.

 

They should prevent people from buying tons of them for mining. I personally think that people that legitimately got these GPUs (for example, buying from a BestBuy drop, even if they buy multiple cards) should be allowed to do whatever they want. However, Nvidia needs to crack down on people buying thousands at once (for mining).

 

I don't see what's wrong with consumers mining on their GPUs to repay them for example, if you purchased it legitimately you should be able to do whatever you want.

[LAwLz]

Nope, nope nope nope.

Terrible decision and I think anyone cheering this on is quite frankly stupid. I am not a miner and I couldn't care less about them. What I am against is the idea that we should be cheering on companies that with software cripple and try to control what we as consumers can and should do with the hardware we have bought.

 

This is like if Tesla sent out an update that made it so that their cars were only able to drive on certain roads and at certain speeds, and then people cheered it on because "now Tesla drivers won't be able to drive on my private road anymore" or "now Tesla drivers can't drive over 50 mph on this 60 mhp road because I think 60 is too high despite the law saying it is legal".

[SFFDesigns]

Just now, LAwLz said:

try to control what we as consumers can and should do with the hardware we have bought.

Exactly. If were to buy my 3060 from BestBuy, Newegg or Microcenter like anyone else, why can't I choose what I do with it?

[AndreiArgeanu]

13 minutes ago, Spotty said:

I wonder if this means there won't be a Super series this time around, since last generation super cards were mostly the next GPU up in the series that didn't quite meet the spec. (Like the 2070 super was a 'bad' 2080 gpu). If they can just dump the poorly binned dies as mining GPUs they don't really need a Super series to get rid of them. 

 

Considering they're nerfing the 3060 mining performance I'm thinking it would have actually been really good at mining. 

I mean if they were to make super series cards, by the time they're released and you can find one in stock the next generation of GPU's is probably going to be on the horizon at which point you have to debate whether to continue waiting or just buy, of course at that point hopefully production would have ramped and there should be less of a worry about stocks at launch.

 

What might happen is, NVIDIA and AMD may delay their next generation graphics cards for like another year so they can get a chance to sell their current designs.

[porina]

On the "why not use older driver" there is no older driver. Currently released drivers do not support the desktop 3060 which isn't for sale yet. It looks like they do support the mobile 3060 though, and I wonder if that could be a hacking weak spot. Presuming the main difference between them is slightly different hardware IDs, it might not be too big a job just to make the driver use the mobile 3060 code on the desktop 3060 ID. By this or some other method, I have no doubt a determined miner will be able to get around it sooner or later, however in the short term it might just be enough to deter casual miners from snapping them all up. 

 

Stopping people from buying many cards is just far more difficult if not totally impractical to do. 

[Blademaster91]

This really won't help much, all someone has to do is use older drivers, and if Nvidia really cared about the mining and scalping issue they should have reduced mining performance with the launch of RTX 30 series cards because it seems really desperate now. A more effective solution would be Nvidia and other companies not selling directly to miners.

[jasonvp]

2 minutes ago, porina said:

On the "why not use older driver" there is no older driver. Currently released drivers do not support the desktop 3060 which isn't for sale yet.

Correct.  And while the myopia in this forum is unreal with the, "but... but... it's not going to stop miners from using existing cards!" the simple fact is: it'll stop them with future cards.  Like the 4xxx-series that'll be released next year.  NVidia's planning for the future; or at least trying to.

 

[germgoatz]

1 minute ago, jasonvp said:

Correct.  And while the myopia in this forum is unreal with the, "but... but... it's not going to stop miners from using existing cards!" the simple fact is: it'll stop them with future cards.  Like the 4xxx-series that'll be released next year.  NVidia's planning for the future; or at least trying to.

 

no it wont miners will just make their own or pull chinese made ones

[jasonvp]

Just now, germgoatz said:

no it wont miners will just make theyre own or pull chinese made ones

I understand reading comprehension is challenging for some folks, but I acknowledged that with my last sentence.

[germgoatz]

2 minutes ago, jasonvp said:

I understand reading comprehension is challenging for some folks, but I acknowledged that with my last sentence.

where did you acknowledge that

[porina]

1 minute ago, jasonvp said:

Correct.  And while the myopia in this forum is unreal with the, "but... but... it's not going to stop miners from using existing cards!" the simple fact is: it'll stop them with future cards.  Like the 4xxx-series that'll be released next year.  NVidia's planning for the future; or at least trying to.

That reminds me, I forgot to make a point in my earlier replies. Because the desktop 3060 hasn't been released yet, nvidia are not exactly removing any functionality you already had. The reduced mining performance is what they are offering once it goes on sale.

[TheSebamed]

I know someone, who already has their hands on 2 3060s and i can confirm from him, that non of the current drivers for 3000 series work on 3060. You might even get a message from NVIDIA with them asking how you even got the card before launch

[igormp]

Too bad those new CMP cards lack enough vram, otherwise they could be useful for other areas too, like ML (as long as they still have the tensor cores enabled).

[justpoet]

Limiting hardware performance via software of what people already own just isn't going to fly.

Using software locks for performance is also just not going to keep things going when linux open source drivers are often involved (not just the proprietary ones are available).  Also, 3060 support has been in drivers for a while, so just using older drivers will work fine too.  So, this solves nothing.  They would have to gimp the hardware itself before selling it.

 

Sounds like how up in arms everybody was at Apple for slowing down old phones...except that actually had engineering reasons.  This is just greed to try and exploit market segments further.  Much like how they try to segment out scientists and professionals with "certified" drivers, but most of the machine learning folks are just getting RTX 30xx's anyway.