"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.
>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.
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)
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.
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.
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!"
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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).
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.
[+] [-] sailingparrot|5 years ago|reply
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|reply
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.
[+] [-] viraptor|5 years ago|reply
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)
[+] [-] lupire|5 years ago|reply
What does this person think "driver" means?
[+] [-] ehsankia|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] juskrey|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ur-whale|5 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] glsdfgkjsklfj|5 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] ccmcarey|5 years ago|reply
Fantastic failure to a flawed endeavour.
[1] https://www.theverge.com/2021/3/16/22333544/nvidia-rtx-3060-...
[+] [-] _Understated_|5 years ago|reply
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!"
[+] [-] simias|5 years ago|reply
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?
[+] [-] zokier|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jperry|5 years ago|reply
[0] https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/cmp/
[+] [-] Ballas|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] IshKebab|5 years ago|reply
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
[+] [-] libertine|5 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] amelius|5 years ago|reply
https://www.roadtovr.com/developer-reward-jailbreak-quest-2/
> Oculus Founder to Match $5,000 Reward for Anyone Who Can Jailbreak Quest 2
[+] [-] cinntaile|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] maxden|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] vmception|5 years ago|reply
Nvidia gets to blame the "super tech savvy crypto hackers" while printing revenue through the roof
[+] [-] ziml77|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ai_ja_nai|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pjc50|5 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] rcxdude|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rodgerd|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] etrautmann|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ev1|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] CivBase|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] GuB-42|5 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] Findeton|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] falcolas|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nootropicat|5 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] russellbeattie|5 years ago|reply
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|reply
[+] [-] varispeed|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jy3|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nullifidian|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] MereInterest|5 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] josefx|5 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] Guthur|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hourislate|5 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] paulmd|5 years ago|reply
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).
[+] [-] silly-silly|5 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] Priem19|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] HugoDaniel|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ur-whale|5 years ago|reply
And a good thing too.
[+] [-] yellowapple|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] TechBro8615|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] peanut_worm|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pyrox420|5 years ago|reply