Nvidia RTX 3060 hash rate reduction is ‘not just a driver thing’

Nvidia had a fairly big announcement this week, revealing plans to limit the mining hash rate of the RTX 3060 to discourage cryptominers from buying up GeForce GPUs intended for the gaming market. At the time, we knew that this limit would be introduced in the RTX 3060 drivers, but as it turns out, the protections in place to limit mining performance go beyond the driver update. 

New details about Nvidia's plan to limit mining on GeForce GPUs have come to light. For example, this change won't be exclusive to Windows as it will also affect systems using Linux distros. Another interesting bit of information comes from Bryan Del Rizzo (via VideoCardz), who stated that to reduce the mining rate there's a “secure handshake between the driver, the RTX 3060 silicon, and the BIOS (firmware)”, therefore preventing the removal of the limiter.

Hi Ryan. It's not just a driver thing. There is a secure handshake between the driver, the RTX 3060 silicon, and the BIOS (firmware) that prevents removal of the hash rate limiter.

— Bryan Del Rizzo (@bdelrizzo) February 19, 2021

The introduction of a hash rate limiter and the announcement of the CMP HX series fits into what @kopite7kimi said earlier this year. The leaker also claimed that Nvidia might discontinue the “old” RTX 3090, 3080, 3070, and 3060Ti cards and launch new ones with the same specifications and the hash rate limiter in place. Nvidia does not want to go back and limit GPUs that have already been sold to the public, so this could be an option for them.

The Nvidia GeForce RTX 3060 is arriving next week, on the 25th of February.

KitGuru says: Do you think Nvidia should re-release the older RTX 30 series graphics cards with these mining limitations in place? 

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