Nvidia fights with miners: RTX 3060 performance will be understated

Daniel ZimmermannFebruary 19, 2021

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Nvidia fights with miners in a peculiar way, since due to the growth in the cost of cryptocurrencies and the coronavirus pandemic, prices for video cards have reached unprecedented values, and in addition, there is a shortage of video cards in the market in general.

This applies not only to the 3000-series, with which things are really bad, but also to cards of previous generations. It got to the point that at the beginning of February, Nvidia resumed deliveries of GeForce RTX 2060 and GeForce RTX 2060 Super, and again began to produce chips for the GeForce GTX 1050 Ti, in order to somehow deal with the shortage that had arisen.

Now, the company has announced another measure that aims to make video cards less attractive to miners. On February 25, 2021, the release of the GeForce RTX 3060 will take place, where mining performance will be forcibly degraded.

The hashrate for mining Ethereum on this card will be halved. It is unclear if these restrictions will apply to other 3000 series models.

“We are gamers to the core. We are fixated on new game features, new architecture, new games and technologies. We designed GeForce GPUs for gamers and gamers demand more. But Nvidia GPUs are programmable. And users are constantly discovering new applications, from weather modelling and gene sequencing to deep learning and robotics. Cryptocurrency mining is one such case. Drivers for the RTX 3060 are designed to detect certain attributes of the Ethereum cryptocurrency mining algorithm and limit the hash rate (or mining efficiency) to about 50 percent”, — the company said in a statement.

Anticipating the disappointment of miners, Nvidia representatives say that they will soon release a new line of special mining video cards – NVIDIA CMP (Cryptocurrency Mining Processor). The CMP series cards will have no video outputs, and they will also get lower peak core voltage and frequency, which will increase their energy efficiency for mining.

It is known that the CMP series will feature four models, two of which can be expected in the first quarter of 2021, and the remaining two will appear on the market in the second quarter.