Cryptominers Have Already Cracked Nvidia's RTX 3060 Hash Rate Limiter (techradar.com) 81
An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechRadar: When the GeForce RTX 3060 was launched on February 25, Nvidia announced that the mining efficiency of the graphics card was deliberately being reduced by around 50% in a bid to get more of the GPUs directly to gamers. However, this limitation appears to have been quickly bypassed by Chinese cryptocurrency miners using customized mods. There was already concern brewing about how well the limiter would stand against savvy miners, but Nvidia has been vocally confident in the hash rate limit. A statement was given to PC Gamer regarding how difficult it would be to get around the protections placed on the GPUs, claiming "End users cannot remove the hash limiter from the driver. There is a secure handshake between the driver, the RTX 3060 silicon, and the BIOS (firmware) that prevents removal of the hash rate limiter."
The NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3060 can deliver around 40-45 MH/s for standard performance but this dropped down to 20-25 MH/s if the GPU detected mining-related activity, providing the limiter is in place. A picture spotted by I_Leak_VN reveals a Chinese mod developed to help miners unlock the full hash potential of the GeForce RTX 3060 graphics card, with the image showing the Geforce RTX 3060 delivering 45 MH/s in Ethereum. The hash-rate limiter mod has also been separately confirmed to work by a Vietnamese Facebook group, apparently even capable of outputting 50 MH/s. So far, according to Wccftech, it appears that the cryptomining algorithm in question is for Octopus, which is different than cryptocurrency than Ethereum, which the hashrate limiter was designed to thwart. That means its possible that an updated driver could introduce a limiter for that cryptocurrency as well, but as we explored earlier this month, Nvidia's efforts to thwart cryptomining is likely fraught with legal issues that might prevent such an update.
The NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3060 can deliver around 40-45 MH/s for standard performance but this dropped down to 20-25 MH/s if the GPU detected mining-related activity, providing the limiter is in place. A picture spotted by I_Leak_VN reveals a Chinese mod developed to help miners unlock the full hash potential of the GeForce RTX 3060 graphics card, with the image showing the Geforce RTX 3060 delivering 45 MH/s in Ethereum. The hash-rate limiter mod has also been separately confirmed to work by a Vietnamese Facebook group, apparently even capable of outputting 50 MH/s. So far, according to Wccftech, it appears that the cryptomining algorithm in question is for Octopus, which is different than cryptocurrency than Ethereum, which the hashrate limiter was designed to thwart. That means its possible that an updated driver could introduce a limiter for that cryptocurrency as well, but as we explored earlier this month, Nvidia's efforts to thwart cryptomining is likely fraught with legal issues that might prevent such an update.
And the funny thing is that you can't even buy it. (Score:1)
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Douglas Adams predicted this. He called it the Shoe Event Horizon, though I think it would have been more appropriately called a "shoepocalypse." Anyway, looks like it's gonna be crypto mining cards for us instead.
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Nothing motivates people like the dream of easy money. No surprise here, at all.
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And when you add dreams of ray-tracing lighting on top of that, all bets are off!
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And even if you could it's nearly the same price as the 3060Ti FE or even higher [bestbuy.ca], at least in Canada.
Overdrive (Score:2, Interesting)
Instead, when mining is detected, the 'limiter' should put the GPU into an overdrive state and burn it up.
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Re: Overdrive (Score:1)
Those who do not understand whitelists are doomed to forever have outdated blacklists.
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Return to sound money policies and you'll get your wish.
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Well, that *would* do it.
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You know what else would do it? Godzilla. At least Japan is already working on Godzilla-size giant robots to fight it.
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If you want to destroy economies, it's a fine plan.
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That means you'd need to earn 100K$ per year to have 10K$ left, which is barely enough to live on even in places with extremely low rent.
So congratulations, you just made 95~99% of the population homeless.
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Those that don't understand tax brackets are doomed to argue against all taxes.
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Parent didn't mention any tax brackets and you assumed they were implied.
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No, you both forget that the top tax % only applies to the last millions or so of income. People making 100k are not getting taxed at 90% no matter what tax scheme is in place.
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The fix was already developed. It's called Proof of Stake, instead of Proof of Work and just needs time to take adoption.
PoW cryptocoins like PoW Bitcoin still exist for now will ultimately be obsolete with PoS- or hybrid based networks providing a solution to the validation problem without causing/incentivizing a continued gradual expansion in energy consumption.
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Proof of stake is a terrible idea.
It's just "The rich get richer."
Fuck that.
Re: How do we deal with this horrible waste? (Score:2)
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It's a great idea for people that want to buy gaming GPUs. At a minimum.
Also, how is PoW now not "the rich get richer"?
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Your premise is not convincing, and you have not given support for your argument there. Proof of Work has been tried and has issues. Proof of Stake, and some hybrid approaches combining some PoW with some Proof of Stake have been devised and found effective.
Proof of stake through staking pools is open to literally everyone on the networks that have tried it,
and it's not biased towards rich or poor. Both rich and poor can stake and earn the same rates from staking on whatever you put at ri
Re: How do we deal with this horrible waste? (Score:3, Insightful)
No, proof of work is fine.
It's just that that is not work!
Building a chair is work.
Teaching my kids is work.
Physical ore mining is work.
"Mining" is not work, and if one's definition of work includes that, however justified, we must now face the fact that that definition is incompolete.
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And it has the Ron Swanson seal of approval, too!
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No mining is definitely work. Its producing something ordered from disorder. What it isnt is productive work, because the thing produced is of no value, its just a frigging symbol that has some mathematical properties you can't use it for anything other than its uniqueness. Uniqueness is available at much lower cost so its a fools game - sadly there are a lot of fools out there.
What would be good is a proof-of-production system. ie something like "i pushed 1 MW/h onto the grid so I get a token!"
Re: How do we deal with this horrible waste? (Score:1)
What is the difference between browian motion randomly assembling molecules into a chair and this then?
Your definition is indeed the correct one we used until now. I just argue(d) that it is incomplete and should be changed to not include such useless, worthless, pointless "work". So my argument is literally: Let's thrash that harmfully misleading word.
Of course an argument could be made that we keep the word that way, and make a new one for actually useful, valuable work. But what purpose would the more ge
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You are implementing a moral qualification to determine whether or not a specific type of activity (and in this case, a specific type of number-crunching) has any value. Or is it that you consider certain activities "work" just because a human spends time doing them?
Does OCR count as "work"? It's a similar type of resource-intensive processing, and it certainly provides value.
To be clear, I personally think that mining is stupid and wasteful, but that doesn't mean that the machines involved in it aren't d
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The problem with Proof of Stake is that all the stakes proposed so far have issues.
For example, say the stake is the amount of currency you are holding. That encourages people to hoard currency, and has the undesirable effect of making the rich richer while for everyone else it's little more than a lottery.
I'm interested to hear ideas about this though, if there is some system I am not aware of.
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Even Proof of Work is still a "proof that you are already rich" system.
In this case, proof that you can buy a bunch of computers and have them spin uselessly wasting electricity.
Its all a "rich get richer" system.
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For example, say the stake is the amount of currency you are holding. That encourages people to hoard currency
"Encouraging" people to hold their money in coins is something Bitcoin, etc, do equally. For proof of stake people would hold coins take part in staking pools, And it is not any worse than Proof of Work that requires miners to lock in similar amounts of money to burn on electricity and single-purpose equipment.
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You do realize that's exactly what the world's fiat currencies are, right? Many of them were backed by something at one time (the US minted gold coins for circulation until 1933 and silver coins until 1964), but now they're backed by sweet fsck-all.
Backed by the taxing power of the US government (Score:3)
Ultimately, the US dollar is a backed by the taxing power of the US government. In a couple different ways.
Price is of course determined by supply and demand. An item has value when people want it (demand) and there isn't sufficient supply for everyone to get as much as they want.
The US government wants the value of the dollar to fall at about 2% per year (inflation). Anything far from that wrecks the US economy. So, does the government, through the fed have the power to control the price, by controlling
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The US government wants the value of the dollar to fall at about 2% per year (inflation). Anything far from that wrecks the US economy.
It doesn't wreck the economy. It wrecks the economy if it's unpredictable, but if it's predictable, you can prepare for it and it becomes a minor accounting annoyance.
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Unfortunately, this, too, has its limits. For example, we'd be getting dangerously close to thi
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Then what will you accept? Almost all currencies are made out of thin air, and all currencies are using vast amounts of electricity and other resources to process transactions.
You'll have to go back to bartering for goods, or using gold. Even gold uses vast amounts of resources to procure, process and subsequently protect against theft.
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That won't work. ETH isn't even a currency.
Bullshit (Score:2)
Nvidia's efforts to thwart cryptomining is likely fraught with legal issues that might prevent such an update.
This argument has never stopped any company from pushing out an update which prevents or adds something. Look at HP and their updates which prevents third party toner cartridges. Your "smart" tv gets an update and suddenly you're inundated with ads or worse yet, if your tv doesn't check in every so often it becomes unusable. Let's not even get into the Microsoft updates which remove functionality
Comment removed (Score:5, Informative)
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Try $3-4/day, if it was $4-5/hr even the scalper cards would be a bargain.
Cryptomining isn't causing the shortage (Score:4, Informative)
This is just showboating on nVidia's part, so they probably didn't put a lot of effort into it. Hopefully when the monsoons hit in the summer the drought will end.
Re:Cryptomining isn't causing the shortage (Score:5, Informative)
Linus tech tips seems to think that this is NVIDIA trying to force miners into buying the new specialised cards they sell. The problem with the last mining bubble is that the PC market got flooded with cheap video cards once all the miners shut down. NVIDIA is hoping to avoid this by ensuing that the cards used for mining cannot be repurposed.
In other words, this is an attempt at building in obsolescence, not 'helping gamers'. If NVIDIA really wanted to help gamers get access to the limited supply of chips it would not be selling mining cards.
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There have been "Miner" only versions of cards which cannot act as video cards, but those got hacked into being Optimus devices.
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Compute/calculation cards also tend to be horridly overpriced, and aimed at a niche. Mining is somewhat special in this context because its one where performance/Watt and price per 100 cards start mattering a lot.
Going for actual compute cards will be pointless if they are mid end cards priced at high end because they got some extra software features.
Re: Cryptomining isn't causing the shortage (Score:2)
I can't wait for the mining bubble to be over. Wasn't eth moving to a different kind of 'proof' supposed to fix this environmental waste?
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Proof of Stake
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Why? What do you think nVidia should do with bad chips then?
They're being binned - chips that aren't 100% perfect to meet 3090 specs become 3080s. Those that don't meet 3080 become 3060s. Those that barely fail, they may become the laptop MaxQ versions
But the chips also have other things like HDMI and Displ
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Yep, the special mining cards don't have video jacks so there is no easy way to use them for gaming.
People used to use them as part of an SLI setup, but SLI is being killed off (no new profiles since January 2020).
I expect that Chinese recyclers will do something about this e-waste, maybe removing the chip and transplanting it to a new PCB, or finding a way to modify the cards into usable ones. They might also be good for cloud stuff, rendering and the like.
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I don't think they care about the secondary market, even to the extent it might crowd out their primary market. One of the big advantages to not fab'ing your own chips is that you don't have the fixed costs of a chip fab to carry. That means its ALWAYS going to be better to sell chips today than tomorrow. You capture the time value on the revenue and if your inventory levels are rising you just cut orders to the fab until you sell it out.
I think Nvidia is probably more concerned about which market segment
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The drought has little to do with the supply issues. In fact the drought itself is only threatening *future* supply. TSMC and others are running at full capacity and have been the entire time. The only thing the drought is calling into question is what the government and chip companies are doing to ensure they make it to monsoon season. TSMC has already laid out contracts and conducted a trial of shipping in water by truck to keep their production at full capacity.
NVIDIA's shortages are related to increased
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That isn't even true.
https://www.techspot.com/news/... [techspot.com]
They'll make it 'til May without interruption, allegedly.
Took them longer than I figured (Score:2)
NVidias problem (Score:1)
Handshake overhead. (Score:4, Interesting)
> . There is a secure handshake between the driver, the RTX 3060 silicon, and the BIOS (firmware) that prevents removal of the hash rate limiter.
How much computational power is wasted on that?
They're literally wasting computational power, to make a device of mine LESS usable.
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Almost zero, probably. It's very likely just checking a flag in the card's firmware, one time when the driver loads.
There will probably be hacked firmwares soon. I don't think they expect it to be particularly secure, just a pain in the arse for people trying to work around it. They would need to flush a custom firmware, and maybe later drivers will detect it and refuse to work.
Hacking the driver is tricky because Windows 10 really really doesn't like unsigned drivers.
Fuck NVIDIA (Score:4, Insightful)
Fuck NVIDIA
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the only valid response.
you might think crypto is nonsense
you might think it's wasteful
you might think gamers have more of a 'right' to hardware
but being okay with a company selling any kind of widget and then attempting to dictate its use to the consumer is always and forever total bullshit. This is just another side of the 'right to repair' coin. (no pun intended.)
Buy why? (Score:2)
Why are graphics cards useful for hashing algorithms in the first place? Cryptographic hash algorithms depend on bitwise operations such as AND, OR, XOR and rotations.
Are bitwise operations really useful in graphics shaders that mostly operate on floating-point triplets?
Why not just remove the bitwise operations from most of the computation units on consumer graphics cards?
I'd think that the driver/card's MPU that assigns shaders to units could very well inspect the code and assign shaders with those instru
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Bitwise operations are necessary for some commonly used
That's actually not very fast (Score:1)
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Of course they have! (Score:1)
Anybody with a brain in their head could have told you this.
Why aren't Nvidia in the BTC business? (Score:2)
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How do you know they're not?
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At the very least, they're doing that to test that those "mining-only" cards are working properly! The QA department demands it!
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If their cards are so good at mining, why don't they simply keep their entire manufacturing inventory to build a mega-mine and get rich?
They make the chips not necessarily the cards which aside from the small number of FE cards are usually 3rd party vendors using nvidias chips and design specs Nvidia enforces partners adhere to. On that note some of those aforementioned card manufacturers have been doing exactly that, zotac for instance. Not smart long term because you'll lose customers and the whole bad pr isn't great for business and many things factor into why it is a bad idea. You only break even after a given amount of time and if the
Nvidia should just get the hint (Score:2)
Crypto is a thing. There is obviously a big market for GPU mining hardware, obvious because the gamers are loudly admitting it is causing scarcity and because Nvidia is hobbling its own product in response.
Nvidia might consider the opportunity to grow and make optimized cryptomining hardware. They can't beat China on Bitcoin but there seems to be a big market in alternatives. X11, Monero, hybrids like Nexus, and ASIC-resistant ones like Monero.
So ramp up and make new dedicated hardware optimized for specifi
'crypto'currency is an enviro disaster (Score:2)
I admire the idea of proof-of-work as applied to a currenc system, but the more I read about it, the more firmly I believe it is our moral imperative to shun it, in its current form. The proof-of-work schemes used by the major 'crypto' currencies soles a purpose-free, throwaway problem producing nothing but waste heat. We should be pushing for systems which solve meaningful problems as proof-of-work instead (protein folding / vaccine antigen configurations / difficult math proofs / physics accelerator resul