NVIDIA promised to protect the GeForce RTX 3060 from miners, and soon released the miner driver

The high-profile story of limiting the performance of the GeForce RTX 3060 3D card when mining Etherium, which Nvidia invented in order to discourage miners from this model, failed woefully. Moreover, it failed twice, and the second time due to the fault of Nvidia itself.

The news that GeForce RTX 3060 protection against mining was hacked appeared last week, but then were discussed only specific algorithms, so it was impossible to assert a full-fledged hack.

And now, according to the Japanese resource PC Watch, the protection invented by Nvidia has fallen completely – and for this it was not necessary either to edit the driver or touch the BIOS. The mechanism of the protection bypass system is not disclosed, but with it the video card demonstrates excellent performance – about 48.5 MH / s!

However, in order to get such performance in mining, it is not at all necessary to break or bypass something: you just need to install the latest version of the experimental Nvidia driver numbered 470.05 (for both Windows and Linux).

The company added support for WSL CUDA to it, but forgot about protecting the GeForce RTX 3060 from mining. As a result, if the performance of the GeForce RTX 3060 in mining with a regular driver is about 21 MH / s, then with an experimental one it is 42–46 MH / s.

“We are not surprised that someone was able to lift the restrictions. We just didn’t expect the solution to come from Nvidia itself”, – PC Magazine journalists are indignant.

Last month, the company unveiled a cryptocurrency protection limiter on RTX 3060 cards to help dissuade Ethereum miners from purchasing the product. According to Nvidia, the limiter could not be hacked either.

“There is a secure handshake between the driver, the RTX 3060 silicon, and the BIOS (firmware) that prevents removal of the hash rate limiter”, — an Nvidia spokesperson said at the time.

Of course, the bug in the official (albeit experimental) driver will certainly be addressed, but … nothing prevents miners from using it further. In this case, the GeForce RTX 3060 will remain in short supply for a long time.

Let me remind you that recently NVIDIA fixed two serious bugs in GeForce Experience.