Cryptocurrency miners found a way to sidestep Nvidia's anti-mining protections for its RTX 3060 graphics card, and craft coins to their hearts' content.
A day before its 3060 went on sale, Nvidia announced the GPU would require a GeForce driver designed to detect whether the hardware was running proof-of-work algorithms used to mine Ethereum. If this code was observed, the driver would force the chipset to slash its mining efficiency, or hash rate, crippling its ability to produce digital currency.
It was hoped that these measures would deter crypto-miners from snapping up all of these relatively cheap cards at launch, and leave a few more for gamers. It was a little bit obvious that miners would just buy the RTX 3060s anyway in hope that the driver-level protection would be defeated eventually.
And not only did the miners get their hands on the gear, they discovered a way, in some circumstances, to subvert the driver to successfully mine Ethereum. The trick is surprisingly trivial: use another driver. Nvidia recently released a technology preview driver, compatible with the RTX 3060, that included CUDA support for the latest Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL 2), allowing applications to tap into the graphics processor to accelerate things like machine-learning algorithms.
This driver also doesn't impose the Ethereum hashing limitations, and so switching to this software evades Nvidia's crackdown, depending on how you've set up your rig. "A developer driver inadvertently included code used for internal development which removes the hash rate limiter on RTX 3060 in some configurations," an Nvidia spokesperson confirmed to The Register on Tuesday. "The driver has been removed."
Previously:
Nvidia Says It Won't Nerf the Ethereum Mining Performance of Existing GPUs
Nvidia Cripples Ethereum Mining Capability for Upcoming RTX 3060, Announces Dedicated Mining Cards
Nvidia GeForce RTX 30 Series Laptop Shortages Likely as Ethereum Hunters Turn to Mobile Mining
Related Stories
It was predicted that cryptocurrency miners might go mobile thanks to Nvidia's powerful GeForce RTX 30 series Laptop GPUs, and now there is physical evidence of this happening. A Weibo blogger has shared some images of mining rigs that are configured from gaming laptops fitted with one of the new RTX 30 series chips. Dozens of laptops can be seen piled high with the sole purpose of making some crypto profits, with Ethereum being one of the likely candidates for mass mobile mining attempts.
[...] A content creator in China has already demonstrated how easy it was to mine Ethereum on an RTX 3060-powered laptop by casually earning enough money in a coffee shop to pay for their beverage and not incur any power bills.
NVIDIA Nerfs Ethereum Hash Rate & Launches CMP Dedicated Mining Hardware
NVIDIA's announcement today is two-fold: firstly addressing the upcoming launch of the RTX 3060 graphics on February 25th, and secondly announcing a new range of dedicated mining hardware.
[...] For the upcoming RTX 3060, the software drivers for this graphics card will automatically limit cryptocoin hashing rates to half – making how much they can earn specifically halved. The software drivers will do this by detecting the math coming through the pipeline and restricting access to the hardware for those operations. At this point we're not sure if it's a cut in frequency that the drivers will cause or simply limiting the operations to half of the hardware, but either way NVIDIA is hoping this will detract professional miners from buying these cards if the return on them is halved.
Update: NVIDIA has also confirmed that performance restrictions will be going in for their Linux drivers as well as their Windows drivers. The inclusion of Linux drivers is incredibly important, as most dedicated miners are thought to be using Linux rather than Windows.
[...] In the same way that 'crypto' cards without video outputs were pushing into the market for balance, NVIDIA is going a step further and removing the video outputs from the silicon entirely. There are other potential optimizations that could be made for power and performance, but at this point NVIDIA is simply stating as graphics-less silicon. This could be a mix of customized new silicon, or simply silicon already manufactured that had defects in the video output pipeline.
The new NVIDIA CMP HX dedicated mining cards will come in four variants up to 320 W, and from authorized partners including ASUS, Colorful, EVGA, Gigabyte, MSI, Palit, and PC Partner. These cards (along with drivers) are also set to be designed such that more of these cards can be enabled in a single system.
The CMP HX mining cards have lower advertised hash rates than the RTX 3090, 3080, 3070, and 3060 Ti achieve. This could mean lower or higher efficiency depending on the actual power consumption of the cards.
This morning, Nvidia announced that it would artificially reduce the performance of its upcoming $329 GeForce RTX 3060 graphics card when it comes to one specific task: Ethereum cryptocurrency mining. As weird as that news might sound, it was music to the ears of some gamers — who have been trying and failing to get their hands on graphics cards for months due to the great GPU shortage, and blaming miners for part of that.
You might be wondering: what does this mean for other GPUs? Nvidia isn't talking about its plans for future graphics cards just yet, but the company tells The Verge (in no uncertain terms) that it won't nerf existing GPUs. "We are not limiting the performance of GPUs already sold," says a spokesperson.
Previously: Nvidia Cripples Ethereum Mining Capability for Upcoming RTX 3060, Announces Dedicated Mining Cards
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday March 23 2021, @11:32AM (3 children)
So, are these limitations etherium only?
What if you use a coin with another hashing algorithm?
(Score: 2) by takyon on Tuesday March 23 2021, @11:38AM (1 child)
It heard that it only affected Ethereum, not sure if it was true.
This scheme's failure is complete [tomshardware.com] though.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday March 24 2021, @03:53PM
It puts the lotion on its skin or it gets the hose again.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by esperto123 on Tuesday March 23 2021, @01:06PM
Bitcoin is not economically viable in GPUs anymore, peoply mostly use ASICs now.
Ethereum on the other hand has an algorithm that, as far as I can tell, cannot be accelerated to much by using ASICs, so is more economical in terms of ROI to use GPUs.
Other coins don't have much volume to have as much an impact as those two.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday March 23 2021, @12:03PM (1 child)
I'm watching with disappointment how people (even those who should know better) keep trying (mostly in vain) to come up with technologies that only work in the hands of the "good guys". Encryption that has a backdoor only for "legal law enforcement"; Computer hardware that only runs "approved" programs; A machine gun one can fire into a crowd, but will only hit the "bad guys": https://youtu.be/1uCy-T22el8?t=132 [youtu.be]
We used to think it was a joke, back in my day... Must be getting old...
(Score: 2) by Mojibake Tengu on Tuesday March 23 2021, @01:27PM
“The street finds its own uses for things.”
― William Gibson
The edge of 太玄 cannot be defined, for it is beyond every aspect of design
(Score: 4, Interesting) by takyon on Tuesday March 23 2021, @12:13PM (3 children)
If the limiter had succeeded, it would have made the GPUs less profitable in the hands of PC builders who bought them and wanted to run the mining algorithms. But it was understood that well-funded miners could write their own drivers anyway... something that might be unnecessary now due to Nvidia's incompetence.
The dedicated CMP HX mining cards are entirely anti-consumer. These cards without video outputs are simply lowering the fab capacity available to make normal GPUs. That includes previous-gen "12nm" Turing*, "8nm" Ampere, and now apparently "7nm" Ampere [tomshardware.com] (at TSMC, although those are professional GPUs and may have been accumulating unsold). At the prices apparently being charged [tomshardware.com] for even the cheapest CMP 30HX (half the hash rate of the RTX 3060), miners will still nab GPUs if they can. Every mining card created and sold is one less GPU that can be sold on the used market after the current mining craze ends (which was one factor undermining sales of previous-generation Turing).
* NVIDIA AIBs Silently Reintroducing GeForce RTX 2060 & RTX 2060 SUPER Graphics Cards To DIY & OEM Segments, Pricing Close To RTX 3070 [wccftech.com]
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 2) by Mojibake Tengu on Tuesday March 23 2021, @01:34PM
They did not do this by incompetence. They did it in logical paradigm of Mamonot. Intentionally.
Doing otherwise could get them to risk a legal action by stock holders and/or regulators later.
Free market is a myth. There is nothing free about money.
The edge of 太玄 cannot be defined, for it is beyond every aspect of design
(Score: 2) by KilroySmith on Tuesday March 23 2021, @07:47PM (1 child)
>>> The dedicated CMP HX mining cards are entirely anti-consumer.
And, from NVidia's perspective, what would you call a Miner who wanted to buy your product?
Perhaps "Consumer" would be appropriate, along with perhaps "customer".
In a supply-constrained market, a Producer (say, NVidia) may have to choose which markets ("Consumers") to serve. As a business, they will likely choose the markets where they make the most money - which appears to be the mining market where the customers are buying dozens or more boards at a time, and likely require little to no support.
At best, I'd call their approach "pro-miner", not even "anti-gamer", and certainly not "anti-consumer".
(Score: 2) by takyon on Tuesday March 23 2021, @08:32PM
Call it whatever you like, as long as you understand that it's bad for most people who want to buy a GPU for their desktop computer, and there will be less of a rebound since resold mining cards will not be useful for most people.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 4, Insightful) by crafoo on Tuesday March 23 2021, @01:10PM (2 children)
They should price these cards appropriately for the demand they generate. I understand they are concerned about losing their gamer market. Attempting to control the hardware after the sale is a foolish tactic. If the incentive is there, it just won't work.
(Score: 2) by hash14 on Tuesday March 23 2021, @04:04PM (1 child)
Came here to say this. Really remarkable how vendors will never seem to understand that they can't control the hardware once its sold. DRM, locked bootloaders, etc., even device encryption as much as I hate to admit it will pretty much always be breakable. All it takes is a small group of people that are dedicated enough to figure it out.
Not that I'm saying that this didn't work out for Nvidia. As long as they sell the cards, they probably don't care who they go to, and this whole "we care about gamers too" initiative, well if it doesn't pad their bottom line at the end of the day, I can't see why they would care about that either.
(Score: 2) by jasassin on Tuesday March 23 2021, @09:43PM
Came here to say this. Really remarkable how vendors will never seem to understand that they can't control the hardware once its sold. DRM, locked bootloaders, etc., even device encryption as much as I hate to admit it will pretty much always be breakable.
I realize you said 'pretty much' so in terms of those words, tracfone does a great job of locking the boot loader down on their phones.
jasassin@gmail.com GPG Key ID: 0x663EB663D1E7F223
(Score: 2) by DannyB on Tuesday March 23 2021, @02:21PM (5 children)
If GPU customers are buying units for purposes other than gaming, then who is to say that those purposes are illegitimate. (But I think the energy used for crypto currency is a waste.)
What about other non crypto currency, non gaming uses of GPUs? Does Nvidia realize that those other applications exist?
Aside: in the long term, I hope that CPU cores will become so cheap and plentiful that we won't need special purpose GPUs. Or special purpose machine learning hardware. Or special purpose signal processing hardware. The whole point of computers is that the hardware could be programmed to do different things. A machine that could change purposes by merely changing software. A programmable machine is always more complex and thus less efficient than a special purpose machine. But the flexibility is an economic advantage. All it would take is for CPU cores to become very plentiful and very cheap. And I don't mean mere dozens of cpu cores in a desktop machine. Consider how this would change things.
While Republicans can get over Trump's sexual assaults, affairs, and vulgarity; they cannot get over Obama being black.
(Score: 2) by takyon on Tuesday March 23 2021, @02:39PM (3 children)
Nvidia sells GPUs for machine learning, automotive, and supercomputers. Those customers are likely willing to pay more than gamors.
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(Score: 2) by DannyB on Tuesday March 23 2021, @03:02PM (1 child)
It seems Nvidia cares more about gamers than investors. I wonder if the SEC realizes this.
While Republicans can get over Trump's sexual assaults, affairs, and vulgarity; they cannot get over Obama being black.
(Score: 2) by takyon on Tuesday March 23 2021, @03:32PM
They don't care about gamers. The "pro-gamer" "anti-mining" moves are just PR spin. It was seen through almost immediately. Some people remain tricked and will help spread the PR.
Nvidia is a PR machine. They raised prices on Turing (RTX 2000 series) and tried to use crappy ray tracing performance to sell the price increase. They put out RTX 3060 at a $329 MSRP, basically a fake price (AMD will at least sell reference models on their website at MSRP occasionally).
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday March 23 2021, @07:03PM
So what if the customer is willing to pay more? That's none of the company's business. If they try to charge customers too much based on what they're doing, I think it's within the customer's right to set up a straw purchaser to get around that. The company really has no business selling the same product to different customers at different prices. Fuck them if they do that. It's the same problem we have in health care in the USE. We don't need those kinds of shenanigans in other businesses too.
(Score: 2) by EvilSS on Tuesday March 23 2021, @03:30PM
Of course they do. That's why they sell high-priced specialized hardware for those markets. Just go look at the A100. It's also why the license for their drivers forbids datacenter use for consumer cards except for blockchain applications.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday March 24 2021, @05:33PM
To be clear, I think this was a mistake, but it seems like a very fortuitous one... to the point that I could see it having been intentional.
Currently nVidia has a product they want to introduce a market segmentation for. However, if they hard-block crypto-mining, who knows what will happen? Their market research suggests that x% of the consumers will stop buy the different model, y% will buy the consumer one anyway, and z% will just stop buying because they are protesting or are confused. But how confident are you in this? Any jolt is inherently unpredictable.
With this "mistake," they can basically wean people off of the old model. They release the new crippled devices, and oops, there is a huge glaring hole. Now people can still buy it and use it for the not-officially-supported crypto-mining. Therefore the jolt is much less severe than going cold turkey. Also, next year or whenever they make the new model, they can lock it down harder and it doesn't make news. ("We never supported crypto-mining, this is just enforcement of our previously-established policy.") It's a great way to introduce a new unpopular policy.
For example, when introducing a new speed lower limit on a road, first they'll announce it, then they'll put up cameras warning people "you know you are speeding right," and then they'll start having police pull people over and let them off with just a warning, before finally enforcing the rule for real on a known date.