GeForce RTX 3060 Ethereum Mining Restrictions Have Been Broken

https://videocardz.com/newz/pc-watch-geforce-rtx-3060-ethereum-mining-restrictions-have-been-broken

by optimalsolver • 5 years ago

256 313 5 years ago

My take on this is that Nvidia knew fine well that their code would be broken. And in short order too.

I reckon this was just lip-service to consumers, and possibly their investors, that they're "doing something about those bad cryptominers that are making us loads of money".

Plus, whenever something is marketed as unbreakable, I picture guys reading it saying "Oh really? Challenge accepted!"

Ballas• 5 years ago

Well, in this case it looks like NVIDIA themselves broke the restrictions - or at least they are not present in the beta drivers.

jperry• 5 years ago

They crippled their Geforce cards in terms of mining while simultaneously launching different, more expensive, dedicated mining cards[0].

[0] https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/cmp/

ziml772• 5 years ago

It's possible those cards are being made with chips that are too defective to output video. Unfortunately only Nvidia knows for sure and they're not going to say anything truthful about it.

SloopJon• 5 years ago

I haven't seen any pricing on the CMP cards yet. Are you sure they're more expensive?

babypuncher4• 5 years ago

If they could actually enforce this then I would be all for it. Crypto mining is the biggest and most pointless waste of energy since nuclear weapons testing. All these crypto miners are just making the planet hotter, while pissing off people who have more legitimate uses for these cards but cannot realistically obtain one because they are being hogged by the miners.

cinntaile2• 5 years ago

Perhaps this segmentation has some contractual clauses that effectively bans companies from buying gaming cards to mine with? They're not enforceable everywhere in the world, but if it covers a big chunk of the cryptomining world then that's probably good enough. That way they can charge a premium for mining cards.

kmeisthax• 5 years ago

Nvidia already did this once before: their driver license specifically prohibits you from using GeForce cards in datacenters. Only Tesla-branded cards (no, not the car maker) are licensed for use in a datacenter.

The license is pretty much unavoidable, even if you're using Nouveau, because the cards won't work at all unless you give it's power-management processor an Nvidia-signed binary to run, and Nvidia won't sign Free replacements for that binary.

libertine2• 5 years ago

At this point NVIDIA seems to be motivated by shareholders value, and nothing else.

They shifted part of their production capacity to release dedicated cards for mining that have way shorter life-cycle, because they can't be used by anyone else.

They found a way to sell more cards with a higher price tag.

bayindirh• 5 years ago

At this point NVIDIA seems to be motivated by shareholders value, and nothing else.

It's for a long time. This is just the latest layer.

xwdv2• 5 years ago

What’s wrong with that? Being an NVDA shareholder isn’t some select privilege for an elite few. Just buy the stock. I’m currently holding an NVDA position worth over $300k off a modest investment I made 5 years ago. To attack companies for delivering value to shareholders is just jealousy, and speaks ignorance of the market.

xiphias2• 5 years ago

It's mostly short-sighted shareholders looking at quarterly results. I'm not sure long-term shareholders like the games NVIDIA is playing with the companies.

They lost Tesla for self driving, Waymo didn't even consider them, even though they had early advantage in AI. Comma.ai started with NVIDIA chip as well. I think Jen Huang is brilliant, but he's listening to the wrong people.

maxden• 5 years ago

I thought they were trying to stop used up cryptominer cards from flooding the graphics card market. So this doesn't help Nvidia in that respect.

ziml772• 5 years ago

I don't know why they thought that would work for their marketing though. Every tech news source I follow saw right through that. And it was reasonable to be upset at the restriction because someone buying the card for their gaming machine would be the most affected if they wanted to try to make back some of the cost of the card by mining when their computer is idle.

simias4• 5 years ago

It was my understanding that you need very cheap electricity for cryptomining to be worth it, am I mistaken? If not I suspect that most people don't really have a good incentive to mine coins, unless the use it to heat up their flat or something (and assuming that they don't have more efficient heating available).

simias4• 5 years ago

I was also wondering why nvidia felt the need to step in. Selling cards is selling cards, having too much demand doesn't seem like a problem they should want solved.

Sure it does incur some PR cost as gamers are frustrated not to be able to purchase the cards, but I doubt it really damages their brand in the long term, and AFAIK AMD also faces similar issues so it's not like it massively benefits the competition.

If I were nvidia I'd be cynically very happy that miners are buying my cards in droves. What am I missing?

etrautmann4• 5 years ago

There is the issue that miners tend to dump the used cards on the market much sooner than a gamer would.

elorant• 5 years ago

You forget the other part of the equation. Gaming companies. If gamers can't get their hands on decent hardware they'll stop buying games altogether. Thus the pressure doesn't come from consumers alone.

Rule3510• 5 years ago

They anticipated selling stripped down cards to miners for a higher price.

If they wanted gamers to have these cards they would just give out purchase invites via gaming hardware sites like Gamer's Nexus. They already make deals to supply OEMs before general retail, so all the gaming hardware being build is getting a supply either way.

throwaway8581• 5 years ago

Market segmentation is always better if you can pull it off. That way you can optimally serve two demand curves instead of just one. Sell more units at a lower price to gamers, for higher total profit from gamers, and sell at an even higher price to crypto miners, for a higher total profit from miners.

M277• 5 years ago

The problem is that the mining bubble is temporary, and when it crashes, these miners dump their cards in the used market with _very_ attractive pricing.

In 2018, something similar happened; ETH mining became unprofitable and the result was that used Pascal cards were available for the cheap in the second hand market. The problem for NVIDIA? Turing, the successor to Pascal, released in September 2018.... and many people, instead of buying that, just bought used Pascal cards.

IIRC, NVIDIA even commented that high end sales were low compared to previous generations in an quarterly report.

Granted, the second hand market cannot be solely blamed for this, as Turing was really unattractively priced. (They shifted each tier up, so the $370 GTX 1070 was replaced with a $500 RTX 2070)

These mining cards cannot be used for gaming (this is not the first time NVIDIA releases dedicated mining cards. 2017 had P106 mining cards as well, and when people tried using them for gaming on the cheap++, NVIDIA blocked it through a driver update) and thus reduce the risk for NVIDIA in the future.

++there was some software that allowed you to render on a GPU, and output video from another GPU like the dedicated iGPU of Intel CPUs. Looking Glass, I think? But I don't fully remember. These days, this functionality is actually integrated into Windows 10.

fomine3• 5 years ago

IMO Nvidia must sell their video cards for who want to buy gaming device in this timing: new gaming consoles released and in shortage. PC vs console.

IshKebab• 5 years ago

I reckon this was just lip-service to consumers

Nope, this is price discrimination so that Bitcoin miners buy their more expensive mining card. They don't want this to be broken.

See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Price_discrimination

zokier3• 5 years ago

Even if they knew that it will be broken quickly (which I also assume they did), it wasn't still necessarily lip service; even slight deterrence against miners during launch probably helped to get more cards in the hands of gamers, which was the intention. Of course it is impossible to know how big of an impact it really had, but I'd like to think it had at least some for the so important launch day orders.

capableweb2• 5 years ago

which was the intention

Neither me, _Understated_ or you know exactly why nvidia did what they did. What we do know, is that ultimately they answer to their shareholders and they have to show profit. Their motivations for why they do the things they do, can usually be boiled down to: "because it makes us more money".

Nvidia probably doesn't care where the graphic cards go, miners or gamers, as they still make the same amount of money.

chris378792• 5 years ago

helped to get more cards in the hands of gamers

Well, you know, except for the cards that they binned specifically so they could be sold as 'mining' cards. There's no such thing, these are all 3060 GPUs, the mining cards have a slightly different firmware that wasn't even able to do the one thing it was supposed to do.

vmception2• 5 years ago

please, I was here on Hackernews writing challenge accepted and prepared to buy as many of the non-mining cards on credit cards just waiting for the limitation to be removed

amelius• 5 years ago

Plus, whenever something is marketed as unbreakable, I picture guys reading it saying "Oh really? Challenge accepted!"

https://www.roadtovr.com/developer-reward-jailbreak-quest-2/

Oculus Founder to Match $5,000 Reward for Anyone Who Can Jailbreak Quest 2

vmception2• 5 years ago

I came here to write this comment

Nvidia gets to blame the "super tech savvy crypto hackers" while printing revenue through the roof

paulmd16• 5 years ago

No they don't. They acknowledged they released the beta driver themselves that didn't have the mining brake.

ccmcarey• 5 years ago

There's also the fact that a few days ago Nvidia released a signed driver that disabled the restrictions [1] _by accident_. But now that the signed driver is out, anyone can just revert to that at any time and mine whatever they want.

Fantastic failure to a flawed endeavour.

[1] https://www.theverge.com/2021/3/16/22333544/nvidia-rtx-3060-...

Shadonototro2• 5 years ago

i'm pretty sure they did this to prevent a class-action lawsuit

limiting a product after a purchase, i'm pretty sure this is illegal

mschuster912• 5 years ago

limiting a product after a purchase, i'm pretty sure this is illegal

NVIDIA announced this limit prior to public availability and it made widespread news, meaning everyone who bought a 3060 could reasonably be expected to know about the restriction. No chance for a class action.

etrautmann4• 5 years ago

I’m curious how this is different from shutting down a paid service or removing software features. Seems like there’s a large grey area.

chunkyks• 5 years ago

I have my cheque from Sony for OtherOS class action sitting on my desk. The cheque is dated 09/16/2019 [nine years after OtherOS was disabled via firmware], and it's for three dollars and two cents.

floatingatoll2• 5 years ago

They can just revoke the signature, right?

__s2• 5 years ago

Only if network access can access revocation

SilverRed5• 5 years ago

They can't revoke the math that makes the signature valid. As long as the card is unable to get a network connection to work out the driver is revoked, there is no going back on this.

dheera4• 5 years ago

Even if they do some CA-side revoking crap you could just have your system not check, or revert to a previous state in which the signature was not revoked.

paulmd16• 5 years ago

That's what this article is about, yeah, NVIDIA is confirming they screwed up.

It also appears the VBIOS on MSI's 3060 cards didn't include it either, I'm not 100% clear but I'm guessing you need both here. I've seen other discussions where people report flashing it on EVGA cards and then it increases performance to the expected levels.

peanut_worm2• 5 years ago

Makes me wonder if it was intentional. They make more money from miners buying up all their cards, no?

HugoDaniel• 5 years ago

This could drive the bigger question of the feasibility of hardware imposed restrictions.

TechBro8615• 5 years ago

Not quite the 3 days after release predicted in the original thread, but impressive and entirely unsurprising nonetheless.

jleahy• 5 years ago

I got my first even downvotes for suggestion that it would be rapidly cracked in that thread, followed by a lot of 'Nvidia is full of smart people' comments.

There always seems to be a persistent optimism for the effectiveness of this kind of thing. For example how long DRM or anti-piracy methods on games will be effective for.

Jonnax2• 5 years ago

It wasn't cracked. Nvidia released a driver which didn't do the restriction.

tehbeard• 5 years ago

Nvidia is full of smart people

If that were truly the case I wouldn't have to deal with multiple fuck ups caused by Nvidia releasing drivers with improper signing (windows seems fine with it, but virtualbox runs into issues with it due to hardening checks.)

anaganisk2• 5 years ago

Wait till you meet google engineers here, who say "we give a lot of thought, and we know better" Here on HN I frequently notice that people fail to recognise, end of day, to err is human. Agendas change.

Findeton• 5 years ago

These mining restrictions are... interesting, given that Ethereum is about to move towards staking rather soon anyway ..

nootropicat• 5 years ago

soon

The earliest likely merge date is Q1 2022. The only exception is if the situation is urgent (miners attacking, or nicehash having a dangerously high percentage of hash) - in this situation the merge itself could be done in a month I think.

falcolas• 5 years ago

I’ve been hearing this - “moving towards stakes soon” - for at least a year now.

Rule3510• 5 years ago

They have it running, and people are making money off of it. The difficulty now is social, convincing people to switch.

sandworm101• 5 years ago

New idea: Break the cards.

A gamer doesn't need mathematical perfection. 99% of gamers wouldn't care if a card game rendered something slightly off, a pixel or two out of place on a 8k screen. A slight mathematical error wouldn't be noticed. But that same math error would destroy any mining efforts. So I propose that, rather than feeble attempts at software-based DRM, that Nvidea actually break the cards. Add in a tiny math error that gamers won't care about but that will render the cards useless for anything requiring exact calculation.

This would of course be very difficult to design.

pjc503• 5 years ago

Intel managed this accidentally with the FDIV bug: for certain very specific values, floating point division gave the wrong answer.

Then there was the traditional rigged demo solution; one generation of cards behaved differently when the program running was named QUAKE.EXE. That is now almost standard, since part of the reason NVIDIA driver downloads are so large is a huge pack of compatibility tweaks for specific games.

simias4• 5 years ago

Modern engines render scenes in multiple passes, iterating over the same framebuffer until everything has been rendered. Engineering such a flaw in a way that wouldn't lead to dramatic cascading effect will indeed be very difficult to design.

Note that sometimes games do need absolutely exact results, or at the very least reproducible results. For instance sometimes you want to use something like `glDepthFunc(GL_LEQUAL)` which will only accept a fragment if its depth is equal to the depth buffer's value. A small fudging here would cause potentially large visual issues.

I'm not saying it's impossible but I expect that it would create a lot of headache as random, potentially unmaintained games would start glitching here and there.

tpxl• 5 years ago

Which would also make the cards useless for any GPGPU workloads.

tantalor• 5 years ago

Isn't that exactly what they want? To only allow the cards to be used for gaming, not compute tasks like mining.

ali_m• 5 years ago

That might actually suit NVIDIA's interests just fine - they could sell uncrippled GPGPU-capable cards at a premium whilst claiming that they're helping to protect the supply of cards for gamers. However I think it would be difficult to do this without also breaking rendering pipelines.

sodality2• 5 years ago

This would split the market for ML as well.

wmf2• 5 years ago

Approximate ML is a hot research topic.

rtkwe• 5 years ago

The other big use and market nVidia wants to have is ML installations for data centers though. Those also want perfect math and are pretty big business for nVidia. Also no one is running an 8k monitor off a 3060 or particularly well off of a single card usually. Also I dread trying to track down a rendering bug and finding out it's an intentional defect in cards, effects are getting pretty intricate and with raytracing small errors will accumulate over the multiple bounces.

Jonnax2• 5 years ago

I'm always amazed how consumers will demand less for their money.

justwalt• 5 years ago

I definitely wouldn’t buy something that had been intentionally crippled, on principle. Even if it were a very slight crippling.

X-Cubed• 5 years ago

Look at the Dolphin blog posts for loads of examples of where minor math errors add up to completely break a game.

jy3• 5 years ago

Can anyone enlighten and explain why there were restrictions in the first place?

nullifidian• 5 years ago

The official reason is availability -- it's nigh impossible for a gamer to buy a GPU right now for something close to MSRP. The real reason is probably a desire to prevent miners from selling their GPUs on the second hand market, thus increasing sales of new GPUs.

zokier3• 5 years ago

Nvidia is still trying to fulfill orders for 3080 from launch day. The availability problem is real. They do not need to artificially increase the demand for their GPUs if they already are selling way more than they can deliver.

madamelic3• 5 years ago

The problem isn't miners. The problem is no one wants to stop bots and scalpers from buying them en masse.

If eBay prevented scalping and e-commerce created bot protections, demand would stop being absurd.

Nvidia stopped selling cards on their site because they couldn't figure out how to prevent bots from buying them all. Not to mention Nvidia is selling cards directly to large miners by the pallet load.

Guthur2• 5 years ago

There is evidence that many of the new GPUs are being bought by crypto miners and there is vocal out cry because some feel these cards should be for consumers (gamers), which is frankly bizarre.

MereInterest7• 5 years ago

I don't know what is bizarre about it. I think cryptocurrencies are fundamentally flawed due to their environmental impact, and should be banned on that merit alone. Add in the inability to reverse fraudulent transactions and their role in the rise of ransomware, and cryptocurrencies are easily something that should be banned.

I don't see it as bizarre to be frustrated that one's hobby is being priced out of reach by what amounts to an environmentally-damaging pyramid scheme.

hughw• 5 years ago

It seems like a good strategy for NVIDIA to prevent losing market share among gamers. They could maximize profits near term by seling cards at whatever the market will bear. But they'd yield their gamer share to AMD, and that would have long term negative consequences.

p1necone2• 5 years ago

There's two separate use cases/markets both wanting the same product with significantly different budgets - gaming and crypto mining.

The crypto mining market has way more money to burn because they're making it back over time via mining, which means that unless there's enough supply for both markets the gaming market gets (almost) nothing until the crypto mining market has bought all the cards they want.

I have no idea what the solution to this problem is, and I don't think poorly designed driver restrictions is it. But it is an actual problem.

Are there any historical examples of similar situations?

MereInterest7• 5 years ago

Remember about ten years ago, how there was a fad to raise money, then use it to buy every single item on the shelves of a small convenience store? The intention was to keep small locally-owned stores in business by buying more from them. However, even though it brought a lot of profit on that one day, it meant that the shelves were empty for the next few weeks. The regulars saw that, and needed to find somewhere else to shop. The regulars left, and some never came back, leaving the store in worse financial position as before.

Cryptocurrency miners are driving up the prices of GPUs. NVIDIA wants to make sure that they have stock available for their regular customers, because that is where the long-term profit comes from. Ramping up production is not feasible on the short time scale that cryptocurrencies have been around, nor is it known whether cryptocurrencies will be around for long enough to recover such an investment.

TL;DR: Cryptocurrency miners are messing up the long-term GPU market, and NVIDIA is trying to maintain that market.

Rule3510• 5 years ago

But they didn't want to think about it for even five minutes and figure out a friendly way to do this. They should have given gaming sites purchase invites to hand out to members.

There are other ideas too, higher prices on raw hardware but cash-back incentives if bought with games or gaming hardware.

Now everyone hates them. AMD couldn't have paid for such marketing. AMD gives everyone ECC support, unlocked cards. They're (currently) the anti Intel/Nvidia, and the market darling.

madamelic3• 5 years ago

Ramping up production is not feasible on the short time scale that cryptocurrencies have been around, nor is it known whether cryptocurrencies will be around for long enough to recover such an investment.

Bitcoin has been around since 2010. They've had plenty of time to realize this was coming. Even the thickest person could've spotted this wave coming in 2013, in addition to the continued rise of computer and console gaming.

josefx2• 5 years ago

Officially it is a supply/demand issue. The crypto miners are buying up all the high end cards, so NVIDIAs main target audience (gamers, workstations, etc.) end up empty handed.

What a lot of people seem to think: Used up cards could end up flooding the market while miners migrate to the newest cards, cutting into NVIDIAs profit or NVIDIA wants to make more money by selling pure mining cards that can't be reused for anything else.

mamon• 5 years ago

This doesn't make sense to me: why don't they simply price their cards 3x higher and sell them all to miners? Selling to the highest bidder is kind of "Capitalism 101". Their profits would skyrocket.

And what about gamers? Well... they can buy used previous gen cards from miners.

pjc503• 5 years ago

So, does anyone have any technical details on how this works? Both what the block was in the first place and how it was defeated?

I imagine it has something to do with how Etherum is mostly integer math and boolean operations for hashing, while gaming workloads tend to be floating point, but I'm just guessing.

Another factor in the background: the pandemic has caused a worldwide fab capacity shortage. Lots of manufacturers are running around with their hair on fire trying to book fab slots. Even car production is being held up due to IC shortages.

ev1• 5 years ago

Apparently it's gotten even worse in the last month, since Samsung and NXP's fabs are in winter-blizzard-disaster Texas, and TSMC is in a once-in-a-century level of drought area

wmf2• 5 years ago

Most of Samsung's fabs are in South Korea; the Austin fab is a minority of their production.

paulmd16• 5 years ago

I heard that as of last week Samsung's texas facilities are still not back up - when they lost power they also basically lost containment of their materials (most of which are ultra-pure and require special handling) and pressure for the cleanroom itself (so they have to clean and re-sanitize the whole thing).

https://www.extremetech.com/computing/320511-samsungs-austin...

Turns out maybe that setting up your factory in a libertarian tax haven that went out of its way to prevent grid interconnects that would have allowed power delivery to continue, in order to forego enforcement of federal regulations that would have prevented these outages in the first place, might not have been such a great idea.

But muh Texas, "did you know we have the right to secede!?" So cool! /s

etrautmann4• 5 years ago

Isn’t this less due to Covid than to increased demand from different sectors like automotive, etc?

rodgerd• 5 years ago

Also your AV gear. One of the factories of a premium DSP supplier burned down, and now no-one can get DSPs for their home theatres.

DaiPlusPlus4• 5 years ago

Link?

ganoushoreilly2• 5 years ago

Same factory made chips for Audio production hardware too. In fact I think anything using SHARC components has been hit pretty hard. Just a bad year all around for chip manufacturers across the board.

rcxdude2• 5 years ago

I don't know of any detailed analysis, but apparently the block is based around the patterns of memory access etherium mining produces (etherium's proof of work is designed to be memory-bandwidth limited to discourage the use of FPGAs and ASICs in mining, on the perhaps mistaken basis this would prevent the kind of centralisation present in bitcoin mining). It's quite plausible that the implementation of the proof of work could be adjusted to avoid this detection, though depending on the level of sophistication of the recognition it may have been difficult to do without impacting performance.

pyrox420• 5 years ago

No one could have seen that coming... No one!

ai_ja_nai• 5 years ago

These miners are really getting on my nerves: not only they are polluting the planet (1% of electricity in 2018 was for cryptomining), but are driving off the budgets of whole deep learning practitioners

Dma54rhs4• 5 years ago

PC gaming alone wastes the same amount of energy. There are also consoles and the whole industry of game creators surrounding it. In my eyes they are both useless and pollute. Some get kick out of games, some out shitcoins.

cheeze• 5 years ago

Huge difference between running a graphics card at 100% capacity (ok, most eth miners underclock but still use a good amount of wattage close to 100% of the time) and someone playing a video game for a few hours after work one day.

Nowhere near the same amount of energy. Gaming certainly doesn't use 1% of the planets energy, for example...

FireBeyond4• 5 years ago

The same amount?

What gamers are running multiple GPUs in a game 24/7 with 100% utilization?

I don't think it even comes close.

SirYandi• 5 years ago

I would not call video games a waste of energy. Leisure is important.

exdsq• 5 years ago

I'd argue deep learning is just as much a waste for most businesses anyway

LispShmisp• 5 years ago

Strong argument.

lupire3• 5 years ago

0.1%, not 1%

niels_bom• 5 years ago

A counter argument I heard recently: all of the work and resources we need to have physical money is comparable in energy needs and environmental consequences.

I have no source at hand.

I’m also not sure what to think of it.

SomewhatLikely• 5 years ago

That would still be a damning statistic given how tiny a portion of overall transactions are done through crypto.

godelski• 5 years ago

I purposefully waited a bit to build a new computer (first one I've been able to build for myself and not others!) seeking the new AMD and Ampere cards, with the purpose of being able to do some research on my home machine and not a lab one. I figured I'd have to wait a month or two after launch, no biggie, but I got my 5900x last week and still can't find a 3080. This shortage is insane and no one seems to be doing anything about it. I'm extra peeved at NewEgg's shuffle system which I'm pretty sure someone that just took a week of a stat's class could tell you that they are giving the edge to bots and scalpers. While I'm peeved at the miners, I'm also upset that retailers aren't combating them and helping consumers.

paulmd16• 5 years ago

With all this talk of crypto, it's ironic that the problem is essentially the same as bitcoin, it's a Sybil Attack problem. Scalpers can pretend to be dozens of people (registering multiple accounts, trivial variations on address, privacy cards to generate unique credit card numbers, automating all this by botting, etc) and the real underlying problem is that you need is a unique personal identifier.

I personally think hardware identifiers are a good approach. NVIDIA has GeForce Experience, they have access to hardware identifiers and telemetry that will let them see who's actually gaming. This approach works very well for games like Overwatch, where hardware bans are essentially "game over" and you now have to get a new motherboard, CPU, GPU, clean OS install, and new IP address in order to hack again, it is fairly painful and slows down hackers significantly after a ban wave.

(Or something like requiring a unique driver's license, one per person.)

All of the other approaches are trivially gameable. A queue? Scalpers will register 1000 accounts and take all the queue spots. A lottery? Scalpers will register 1000 accounts and win all the lottery cards. etc etc. There will always be retailers if you do not currently have a card or are morally opposed to GFE.

oh_sigh• 5 years ago

BTC uses most of the energy relating to cryptomining, and people almost certainly aren't buying GPUs in bulk to mine bitcoin since ASICs are far more efficient.

SilverRed5• 5 years ago

Carbon tax, carbon tax, carbon tax.

Rather than coming up with a billion restrictions for every new way people invent to waste resources, just charge people for resource usage.

topspin• 5 years ago

Crypto mining can't run on renewables?

Careful here. The 'renewables are cheaper' narrative is sacred.

varispeed• 5 years ago

In my opinion they set their prices too low and have not invested enough in fabs. The demand now way exceeds their capability to manufacture and unfortunately the only way to "restart" is to set prices to a level that will allow building the capacity to satisfy the demand at lower price point. They can try doing those PR tricks, but they'll just waste even more money without addressing the problem.

my1232• 5 years ago

NVIDIA doesn’t own any fabs, they don’t really have a choice.

mywittyname2• 5 years ago

Interestingly. I was watching some interviews with the founders of 3DFX, and when asked about why the company died, their straight answer was: because they bought a fab.

trishume• 5 years ago

If they raised prices they'd still make more money, rather than the money going to scalpers, and they could offer TSMC more money for more fab time, which TSMC could take into account when planning future fabs.

As far as I can tell the reason they don't raise prices is that the PR hit they'd take from all the gamers hating them for it would be a bigger deal than the additional revenue.

ganoushoreilly2• 5 years ago

The had to reduce prices on the 3xxx series due to poor sales on the 2xxx series, it just so happened that crypto growth was happening at the same time. It was a bad situation, but raising prices doesn't solve the problem.

sailingparrot• 5 years ago

"The GPU maker seemed confident that its restrictions couldn’t be defeated, even claiming it wasn’t just a driver holding back performance. “It’s not just a driver thing,” said Bryan Del Rizzo, Nvidia’s head of communications, last month. “There is a secure handshake between the driver, the RTX 3060 silicon, and the BIOS (firmware) that prevents removal of the hash rate limiter.”"[1]

Funny how it turned out to just be a driver thing.

[1] https://www.theverge.com/2021/3/16/22333544/nvidia-rtx-3060-...

serf• 5 years ago

Funny how it turned out to just be a driver thing.

sort of makes one wonder how many whizz-bang hardware features get advertised that are little more than just software, but are oversold as unique physical engineering methods/techniques.

bitL• 5 years ago

You meant NVidia Quadro/Titan workstation performance?

DaiPlusPlus4• 5 years ago

I understand that pretty much the only difference between $3000+ "professional" GPUs that get certified for AutoCAD and other workstation systems are identical to $1000 "gaming" GPUs, just with a different on-card BIOS/firmware and e-fuses. I remember ages ago that people were able to simply re-flash their ATI Radeons into FirePro cards and that unlocked higher performance in some applications.

Same thing with Cisco switches for port-unlocks and Tesla cars (EAP and FSD are just software features, assuming you have HW2+, and rear heated seats are standard, just not activated unless you pay to enable it if you didn't get the cold-weather package when you ordered it).

Impossible• 5 years ago

Raytracing (RTX) is largely a software thing, although real hardware got added to improve ray-triangle and ray-AABB intersection performance.

deaddodo• 5 years ago

Reminds me of how every modern silicon has a "cutting edge, future technology" neural network built into.

Then you notice the asterisk and realize it's just an accelerator (usually just a few instructions with some dedicated logic) and all the NN is still in software.

Lorin• 5 years ago

Oh, like RTX Voice - which 'requires' a 20-series GPU as a minimum requirement. Of course after editing the installer it works just fine on pretty much any GPU with cuda cores.

anonymouse008• 5 years ago

It’s hardware if it’s embedded with C! Never forget that -

With love,

USPTO

yellowapple2• 5 years ago

I'm pretty sure this is exactly the reason why Nvidia is entirely unwilling to cooperate on FOSS drivers, and why neither Nvidia nor AMD are willing to support FOSS device firmware.

Which is a shame, because a GPU with FOSS firmware and comparable specs to the AMD/Nvidia hotness could use that software-driven flexibility to its advantage.

lupire3• 5 years ago

"There is a secure handshake between the driver, the RTX 3060 silicon, and the BIOS"

What does this person think "driver" means?

whalesalad• 5 years ago

Right? That’s exactly what a driver is lol.

viraptor2• 5 years ago

I don't think the comment was wrong. The driver is limiting the rate and the card validates you're using a signed driver. It's still the whole protection system, not just the driver.

I.e. you couldn't update the driver yourself. That relevant "hack" seems to be the official beta/development driver without the restriction. (The other solutions don't modify anything)

optimiz3• 5 years ago

How would the card validate you're using a signed driver? The card only sees what the driver sends it, so presumably the input could be spoofed. Also the card is not the root on the system's TPM.

Usually it's the reverse - normally drivers validate that the card's firmware is signed.

As an example, people would hack AMD Polaris card firmware memory timings for better mining performance.

To do so you needed to disable the firmware signature check in the AMD driver, and to do this you needed to disable the driver signature check in Windows.

glsdfgkjsklfj• 5 years ago

oh, i guarantee you it is not just a driver thing.

In a few months, when games start to get awful performance on those cards, they will claim they can't fix it because it is in the silicon and can't be patched.

But this is on everyone hoping graphic card driver authors would know anything about anything. heh.

juskrey• 5 years ago

Probably the same as many fancy copy protections turned off by patching single jnz/jz command

ehsankia• 5 years ago

Doesn't the post say that this partially removes the rate limit, still not 100%? So clearly something is still working no?

ur-whale• 5 years ago

Exactly as predicted the day the NVidia announcement came out.

And a good thing too.

coolspot4• 5 years ago

Now if someone could enable full CUDA on RTX 3060/3070/3080, that would be noice!

And multi-stream video encoding while we are at it.

unclekev• 5 years ago

Now if someone could enable full CUDA on RTX 3060/3070/3080, that would be noice!

I thought there were no CUDA limits on the RTX 3070/3080/3090 cards?

I've got a 3080 from launch and have not noticed any artificial caps or performance issues when doing CUDA-related things.

CivBase• 5 years ago

Hopefully they give up on the idea for future cards. NVIDIA shouldn't decide what I can do with my GPU.

GuB-42• 5 years ago

That's the same idea as for GeForce/Quadro. Gaming GPUs are crippled so that they work poorly with professional software (ex: CAD).

AMD does the same thing with Radeon/FirePro.

I don't expect Nvidia to give up on that. And to be honest, for me personally, it is a good thing. I don't mine and I don't CAD, having GPUs unavailable for the former and overpriced for the latter results in more affordable prices for myself.

wvenable• 5 years ago

Apple is laughing at this comment.

kjjjjjjjjjjjjjj• 5 years ago

Ah yes, a secure platform is the same as an aftermarket graphics card. Boy I wish I could disable SIP on my mac and then boot whatever I want or install whatever kernel extensions I want... oh wait. I can!

dheera4• 5 years ago

Hell can we modify Tesla cars to mine Ethereum when it's not in self-driving mode?

tracerbulletx• 5 years ago

cool cool cool. I never wanted a new video card anyways.

ohiovr• 5 years ago

That took longer than I thought it would.

russellbeattie• 5 years ago

My god, this whole thing went pear shaped so fast, it's incredible. I bet this launch will be taught in B-schools as a lesson for would be marketers.

Nvidia seemed to be doing the right thing at first, taking the concerns of their most enthusiastic customers seriously and doing something about it. Given how badly the company usually treats their customers, it seemed like a nice gesture.

Then the Internet trolls came out and accused the company of just giving the issue lip service, since it was obviously just a software fix, it wouldn't really stop the big crypto farms from using the cards. Nvidia is evil, as per normal.

Then the company responds with a lie, that it's actually a hardware implementation. No one believed it, but that's their story. Nvidia is trying to do the right thing.

Then all the gamers - most of whom aren't even in the market for a RTX 3060 - start flipping out about how the resale of the cards is going to be lower because they're all nerfed. So by charging full price for the card anyways, Nvidia is actually ripping them off!! Nvidia is evil again.

Then this screwups happens and everyone now is screeching about how they knew it all along and Nvidia is actually lying about EVERYTHING!! Maybe they're creating artificial shortages in the first place! It's all a conspiracy man!!

I don't think I've ever seen an reasonable idea like this go tits up so fast. Remember when Netflix announced Quickster and it bit them in the ass so hard they had to cancel the whole spinoff? This is what this reminds me of: Good intentions badly implemented.

ghego1• 5 years ago

I'm not too surprised. I think it's in Nvidia best interest both to claim that the hash limit is unbreakable, but at the same time also make it breackable

silly-silly• 5 years ago

If you wanted to really limit it to gamers, why not partner with steam/origin/etc and have them pass out tokens to buyers for use with vendors based on previous gameplay history.

This of course requires vendors to also play with this scheme, which I'm not sure NVIDIA has the clout to ensure that point-of-sale people can enforce this.

hourislate• 5 years ago

Ahh the old "lets make it look like a mistake and release a driver that unlocks the mining restrictions".

Maybe I'm old and cynical but does anyone actually think this was an error on NVIDIA part? Their goal is to sell as much GPU as they can, their shareholders wouldn't want it any other way. My opinion is it was a convenient mistake that will sell a lot more cards.

paulmd16• 5 years ago

Maybe I'm old and cynical but does anyone actually think this was an error on NVIDIA part?

Yes. And I assume we'll see the mining brake return on 3080 Ti / 3080 Super and on 4000 series cards as well.

This looks very much to me like someone built a feature branch on an old version that didn't have the mining brake installed, and then pushed the branch somewhere they shouldn't. I see no reason to doubt that - classic case of Hanlon's Razor in action:

"never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity".

Their goal is to sell as much GPU as they can, their shareholders wouldn't want it any other way.

Segmenting miners to a different, higher-priced segment makes them more money. You're selling two cards instead of one, on top of increasing your effective production capacity (because the mining cards are on a different, older node that is not bottlenecked as badly).

Priem19• 5 years ago

I wish I could reply with a nuanced take, but I can't. Ban these cryptocurrency pyramid schemes already. https://www.cynicusrex.com/file/cryptocultscience.html

peanut_worm2• 5 years ago

I think it’s safe to assume that PC gaming is dead for the immediate future or until Ethereum moves away from mining

yellowapple2• 5 years ago

Called it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26188700

GeForce RTX 3060 Ethereum Mining Restrictions Have Been Broken

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