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Comment by jsheard | Hacker News Reader

Someone with early access to 3060 hardware, but not access to the launch drivers managed to wrangle it into working on pre-3060 drivers and still found that mining performance was artificially reduced. It starts high then falls off after a minute or so when some heuristic decides that mining is happening.

https://videocardz.com/newz/zotac-geforce-rtx-3060-early-gpu...

There's speculation that the limiter might actually live in the cards VBIOS, which is much harder to modify than the driver as newer Nvidia cards require a signed VBIOS to boot.

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I'm really curious about how they got the card working without the specific drivers for it.

I'm also curious if this "mining detection" is going to kick in "accidentally" on other compute loads. It would be really crappy if the CUDA performance of these cards is bad because they don't want miners using them.

If you watch the Russian source video he seems to somehow install Nividia's drivers selecting 3070.

So we’ll see mod chips for GPUs soon?

YES! I hope so if only to feel like I am back in the scene for just a moment. Miss those days. Maybe they can mod the VBIOS to show the crack group's logo on bootup just like how old VGA cards would show some company text before handing off to the PC.

> old VGA cards would show some company text before handing off to the PC

My Gigabyte motherboard is doing that. Ain’t too old, has AMD’s X570 chipset.

Well, that's the motherboard, not the videocard. Every motherboard does it.

Yep, that's through the BGRT, which is part of ACPI. I'm not actually sure if a GPU could export one to the BIOS, but I assume not.

The connection to the monitor is physically located on the video card. So the gpu could display whatever it wants without asking or coordinating with the motherboard.

Or the CMP line will actually fit the needs, and no need for games of whack a mole.

It basically depends on three things though. The CMP card supply needs to be sufficient for the miners' demand, they can't be more expensive, and the question of how much does being able to resell the cards to gamers play into the value proposition.

I actually avoid the used video card market now, the resale price is insanely high and odds are the card was driven as hard as possible for months at a time mining crypto before being swapped out for the latest and greatest.

Follow-up: Bryan Del Rizzo from Nvidia says the limiter involves the cards firmware: https://twitter.com/bdelrizzo/status/1362619264423747590

I don't speak Russian but the source video shows him force installing Nividia's drivers and selecting 3070.

Pure speculation but I'd imagine that Nividia's drivers can properly differentiate and already had the limitation in the current release.

Does this also happen during machine learning workloads?

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