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Bitcoin Graphics Software

Nvidia Confirms It Accidentally Unlocked RTX 3060 Ethereum Mining (theverge.com) 41

Posted by BeauHD from the genie-is-out-of-the-bottle dept.
An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Verge: Nvidia made a big deal about reducing the hash rate of Ethereum mining on its new RTX 3060 graphics card last month. A special system was supposed to make the RTX 3060 undesirable for cryptominers, but Nvidia has now confirmed that it has accidentally unlocked those restrictions with a new driver. "A developer driver inadvertently included code used for internal development which removes the hash rate limiter on RTX 3060 in some configurations," says an Nvidia spokesperson in a statement to The Verge. "The driver has been removed."

While Nvidia has now removed the driver, the genie is out of the bottle. Nvidia's latest 470.05 beta driver automatically unlocks performance for most RTX 3060 cards, boosting hashing rates for Ethereum mining. Mirrors of the driver can easily be found online, and Nvidia won't be able to prevent RTX 3060 owners from continuing to use this driver in the future.
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Nvidia Confirms It Accidentally Unlocked RTX 3060 Ethereum Mining More

Nvidia Confirms It Accidentally Unlocked RTX 3060 Ethereum Mining

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  • Like everyone, I have never seen a RTX 3060 irl, I don't think it exists.Who cares about this fantasy GPU?

  • I just figured that dedicated miners would have altered the driver before anyway to get around whatever limitations were placed on mining, does anyone know if that was the case?

    It could be the shortage of this car is from gamers alone, but I figured some of it had to be from people interested in mining.

    • Someone can correct me if I'm wrong here, but I was under the impression that the driver was signed and would refuse to load if it was altered in any way.

      • You might be thinking of the firmware the driver loads into the card. This sounds like the "block" is purely in the driver.

        • Re: (Score:3)

          by Luckyo ( 1726890 )

          My understanding is that while block was in the driver, which in turn is signed and directly linked to card bios (and supposedly even GPU chip's firmware). That's what supposedly made it "impossible to circumvent" according to nvidia.

          Because without the driver, the card only has baseline functionality of "it boots with minimal feature set so you can load a driver to unlock the full feature set", and card's bios and chip's firmware will not accept an unsigned driver.

          • The signed drivers shipped without the restriction so it is game over already. However, we also know at least as far as GTX 1080, one could use unsigned drivers even though the firmware itself needed to be signed. We know this because it is how people use a GTX 1080 inside VMs when not configuring KVM or VMWare to hide itself. I seriously doubt the firmware actually has a way to detect in-memory modifications of the driver image though and Linux offers ways and means to remove security measures which woul
            • yeah nvidia say (unverified) that the driver and bios have a secure handshake, and the bios is also signed to be able to run on the card (verified). the leaked driver unlocks eth mining but only on cards in a 16x slot with a hdmi display connected. most serious miners have 1x risers and the cards are headless so this doesnt easily scale to commercial levels of mining, but it is good for gamers who want to mine when not gaming to help pay off the card. my suspicion is the 16x bus requirement is in the bios w

              • the leaked driver unlocks eth mining but only on cards in a 16x slot with a hdmi display connected. most serious miners have 1x risers and the cards are headless ...
                my suspicion is the 16x bus requirement is in the bios which is still secure, but it'll be interesting to see what reverse engineers can come up with now they have a working sample to study.

                If the bus requirement is driver-side and spoofable, but the display-presence is bios side, cue the construction of fake-display dongles in 3, 2, 1, ...

                (Pers

  • I believe that.

  • This driver version will be "golden" for miners. Since they are not into running games in the first place, there will be absolutely no reason to update at all. Just
    (1) set up a machine,
    (2) make 100s of images,
    (3) ... and profit

    unfortunately, this formula actually works...

  • So? (Score:3, Interesting)

    by slashmydots ( 2189826 ) on Tuesday March 16, 2021 @05:48PM (#61166122)
    I should remind everyone that compared to the 3070 and the GTX 1080ti, the maximum MH/s in Ethereum on the 3060 is absolutely pathetic. It is not even in the top 10 for most efficient cost vs income mining hardware. It actually doesn't even beat a Radeon RX570 since they're around $350 and get 29 MH/s.
    • The RTX 3060 over a GTX 1080TI will make more money when power cost is taken into account according to nicehash calculator.
  • when shear incompetence will do the same job.

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Anonymous Coward

      Incompetence? Free Publicity for the original restrictions and now greater publicity for the gaffe?

      I have some oceanfront property in Utah I can sell you cheap...

  • Perhaps nVidia forgot this, but one of the reasons why I buy your cards is for real-time raytracing and also rendering. If you clip the wings on your video cards, I will buy AMD's, and I will take a few people with me, too.
    • Do either of those operations require a high hashrate?
      • No, but maybe the things they do require are the next to get clipped though so Nvidia can sell you a more expensive card to meet your specialized needs. Of course the argument falls flat because both Nvidia and AMD already do this with their professional line of cards and the special drivers for them. In some cases the cards are actually different and contain specific hardware that the consumer cards don't, but in most cases the cards are just the consumer cards that don't have the functionality locked down

  • No matter what, miners with sufficient motivation will bypass your driver blocks.

    They may THINK their driverset is black-box, but it ain't so.

  • <Press Conference>"Whopps! We left this driver with mining enabled. We have removed it and recommend people updating to the latest driver." </Press Conference>
    <Internal Meeting>"We've released a statement explaining it was a mistake, but the many mirror sites already have it. Now there is a driver that miners can use to buy our GPU cards and keep demand up so we can raise the prices with each new card release." </Internal Meeting>

  • Depending on it for security in this case is absurd.

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