Nvidia cripples cryptocurrency mining on RTX 3080 and 3070 cards

Great commentary on the unsustainability of it all. Nvidia has no incentive to make sure the GPU market operates in a sustainable way by supporting a secondary market. Thus, they have every incentive to cut the legs out from under resellers. It would also be anywhere from hard to nearly impossible to give them an incentive to allow the secondary market to operate in such a way as to increase the sustainability of their product.

Edit: Aren't we a bit touchy today? (Turn showdead on and look a little down thread.)

Taking into consideration that the gamer segment is now well aware that miners and scalpers are ruining their supply, I really hope that when the flood of used cards happen, nobody with a grain of salt will buy devices that have run at 98% their thermal limit for years. I really hope that market-ruining miners will find themselves with a ton of hardware nobody wants anymore.

Some back of the envelope math. The current hashrate is about 650000 Gh/s, which is almost 4x as much as at the start of the year. So an increase of about 50000000 Mh/s. A 3060 Ti produces around 60 Mh/s, that's about 8.3 million 3060 Ti's. Of course not all of the added hashpower comes from new cards so the numbers need to be taken with a grain of salt.

On other note, the "cloud" Vega that AMD sold to the very few cloud videogaming companies comes with exact same limitations, and a clause of non-resale, and non-refurbishment. This way buyers, can't simply solder display connector to those cards, and sell them on open market.

Imagine Intel would've sold their Xeons with the same limitations... but wait, they actually did this for "custom fused" Xeons they sell to big dotcoms.

Now, who said that silicon vendors can't "vendor lock" their dotcom clients? By buying direct, all those dotcoms have exposed themselves to an even bigger supplier risk of this type, and not reduced it.

I suppose demand is high enough that people will buy whatever they can get though.

What they could have done is instead sell the video-capable cards in a way that discourages bulk buying (limits per customer, maybe a little bit bulkier and harder to correctly cool if several are in a rack) and then release a more bare-bone (no bulk, just a heatsink and optional fan) mining version that can be bulk-ordered and performs well in a rack mount.

Gamers (generally very price-conscious) get a more stable close-to-msrp price now and in the future, nvidia secures their supply

You're right with respect to e-waste, but I wonder if they may end up really subsidizing hobbyist data analysis.

I thought the non-LHR cards are fully featured?

After being used for mining, it's e-waste whether or not it has video out. This helps prevent some poor sucker from buying e-waste.

What nvidia is doing is recognizing that the needs of existing long time consumers / clients / partners are not being met by the current situation. Yes, it inflates short term profits and increases their pricing power, but long run if you can't buy nvidia for your dev box, your game box etc, this reduces the long run nvidia ecosystem.

Crypto folks come and go. Serve them on a short term basis with something at a higher price point or make them lock in long term orders

Almost every business works this way. Long time regular customer - you get pricing option A. Rando runs in with lots of cash? You don't let them destroy your long term customer relationships, but sell them some extra / high margin stuff if they are willing to pay enough.

Intel just went through this ecosystem pain with ARM. They said no to doing iphone chip. Now an ecosystem has built up around ARM with far more investment than would have been there without apple leading the way.

I was thinking about buying NVIDIA for the next GPU based on performance numbers alone.

However, against it there's:

1) Terrible Linux support(and history). This is specially important now that most of Steam's library runs on Linux without issues. It was eye-opening to see Cyberpunk running almost perfectly on DAY ONE with the same performance as Windows. In the case of AMD, with open source drivers.

2)Control freak shenanigans (see also: this thread). This is doing nothing to address the GPU shortage. It's just dishonest market segmentation.

3)Their completely unacceptable behavior regarding reviews. They were punishing reviewers that didn't place enough emphasis in ray tracing. They would be blacklisted just by saying it's not important (which I happen to agree with). They handled the situation horribly.

Sometime, someone has to do something about problematic behavior. The US government isn't going to do anything about it (as is evidenced by reality), but private companies are more than welcome to shape their products to match that company's intended vision for their product. Twitter didn't want fascist rants, Nvidia doesn't want all of their cards to be hoarded by crypto miners.

If this has any effect on anybody who isn’t a crypto miner, it’s going to be to open up possibilities and/or save them money. I have trouble finding fault with that, and we’re surrounded by far more egregious erosions of our “right” to buy and use general-purpose computers.

Maybe my prediction in where most HN commenters stand in principle on this issue is wrong, or just maybe, this is a rare example of a time when the principle (hardware should be free to run at their max capability, not deliberately hamstrung, etc. etc. - to me, this kind of ties in with the "software should be free" principle) conflicts with a more immediate desire to play the latest video games (lol).

Harder to take the principled approach when you've been waiting "like 11 whole months for the 3080 I mean seriously dude".

Cryptominers are a far greater threat to general purpose computing than Nvidia. They ought to be compelled by law to purchase carbon credits for their mining, to offset the environmental destruction their petty "get rich quick" efforts have inflicted on the planet, enforced through Coinbase et al. and with noncompliant (offshore) exchange/wash platforms blocked and their users prosecuted through national laws and international agreements. Cryptominers and the malware they've created makes a very strong argument for walled gardens with enforcement and review of applications, simply because the vast majority of PC users are worse than useless at preventing misuse of general purpose Windows.

I also think this proves Apple right on integrating the GPU on-die with the CPU, and not selling the CPU standalone at all, because Apple — unlike Nvidia and AMD — is having no such trouble with miners on their general computing platform. This issue is for whatever reason restricted to DIY PCs, and cryptomining will be the end of DIY PCs if this keeps up.

(Perhaps you meant "DIY computing" rather than "general purpose computing"? I definitely see Nvidia's steps as interfering in the build-your-own computing market, but if it keeps the DIY computing market from dying off in favor of Apple, isn't that a desirable outcome?)

The market is bimodal. There's the crypto miners and there's the gamers. Right now, gamers are getting starved out and middlemen are pocketing the surplus selling gaming cards to crypto miners.

Nvidia want to capture more of that surplus for themselves, while also taking money from the gamers. Satisfy both markets with different products at different prices, prices that leave less money on the table.

This makes sense to Nvidia because it creates a segment differentiation and will allow them to charge more for the higher hash rate parts.

So given how few choices Nvidia has, I think I trust them to call this. At the very least, it should reduce their hardware demand to tolerable levels, so they can focus on securing better silicon rather than simply more.

Personally, I'm ok with this approach as it's tied to the hardware, and can be researched by everyone ahead of time to avoid "Model X, manufactured from Y to Z dates". Hopefully this can be determined from the SKU + serial number easily by a human reading the serial number.

It's not a software driver change nerfing the card remotely, which I would be absolutely against. It appears it could be eventually reverse engineered and bypassed, which I'm also ok with.

It's also not immediate e-waste as miners will avoid it anyway, and gamers can just use the card as normal regardless of the manufacturing run -- this isn't hardware that lacks video ports.

That's a weird hill to die on, since they're explicitly marketing and selling these cards with "LHR" branding and NOT discontinuing other non-LHR product lines. These are cards specifically for folks who don't use the features which are throttled.

If they were doing this across the board, that's one thing. But they're not. If it means lower costs or increased availability for consumers who want them, that's a win.

Moreover, they're not disabling anything, they're throttling. One or two GPUs are hardly going to mint you a fortune in ETH in the first place. The difference in hash rates is not affecting anyone who meaningfully cares about general purpose computing. Nobody is switching their industrial mining rig over to play Dota. They've throttled an extremely niche use case which makes the cards more broadly available to the public instead of a very specific single-purpose industry: that hardly seems like an attack on general purpose computing.

But crypto with proof of work is such a huge energy wasting uselessness that any action against them is welcome. Besides if they don't, then their old markets will disappear because they can't get cards anymore and start doing other things, and then when crypto is made illegal or crashes for good, they suddenly lose their whole market.

Nvidia wants to serve gamers over miners, presumably to establish and maintain brand loyalty for future purchases. If they can't increase supply, the only other way is to reduce miner demand. That's their goal; this limitation is just a technical detail of implementing that. Hardware segmenting to serve different markets has been a thing forever and I don't see any reason to call this out as any worse.

That said, I like that Nvidia and AMD are taking different approaches here. That's free market capitalism, let the invisible hand guide the outcome.

The silicon might also be capable of running the latest nvidia self driving ML models, yet you don’t get that just because it’s capable- you have to pay them $x so that they have the money to pay their engineers to develop those features (and pay the company directors, and shareholders, etc). It’s the same for things like the professional quadro view software - https://www.nvidia.com/en-in/design-visualization/software/q... - there’s only a compelling business case to make this software as a result of the higher margins they make on quadro cards.

[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tragedy_of_the_commons

I think you got that, but just to be super clear that is the case.

No need to be angry as far as I understand that's how chips are made nowadays. You can have wildly different consumer offerings on the same die.

You buy 3 inflated balloons, seller takes five of them and while you are watching pops 2. "Did you really have to do that"? In chip manufacturing this makes a lot of sense. Your anger is basically towards a manufacturing process and naming not the end product. And the process is just highly optimized while naming keeps thing pretty transparent - it wouldn't look good if they tried to sell it as a completely new card.

The problem really is that cryptominers will happily scale their purchases arbitrarily high

Since you're asking about feelings: Nope. I'm not a miner, and I believe the whole crypto thing is a pyramid scheme that is basically gambling in another form, so I'm not angered. In fact, I'm glad: I hope it keeps uninformed people from spending huge sums on bogus "get rich quick" schemes, just like the 2008 housing market was enabled by people who didn't understand balloon mortgages, and slimy lenders that exploited them. Now if I could only convince my friends that are losing their shirts in DOGE + Robinhood to cut their losses and put that money into actual investments.

An attack on general purpose computing that only affects the people who've completely fucked up the GPU market in service of one narrow, non-graphics use case?

Cool story, bro.

Then let the crypto people pay 6x for 4x performance using half the power, e.g, meanwhile using that income to fund the research for the the 3nm, 2nm, 1nm production lines.

https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/cmp/

I think it's perfectly reasonable for them segregate the capabilities for their varying consumers.

Nah. I shed no tears for the miners. They're in it for profit and their profit is not my problem. Nothing about their business is "general purpose computing."

Sorry for the strong wording but if people didn't tolerate this crap from GPU vendors that would solve a lot of problems everyone has. You mention attacks on personal computing, the main reason everyone is stuck with vendor provided Android system software on their phones is because the closed GPU drivers are heavily coupled with it. Otherwise lots of people would have dumped it when they crippled the file API and started creating problems for termux. Because of this there's no real competition for iOS so Apple and Google can pretty much get away with whatever they want.

In addition the detection is not magic (it can't be) so there are going to be false positives. Can't wait until my games start dropping frames 30 minutes in because the driver decided my competitive FPS was actually mining crypto.

Imagine a headline like "Charmin introduces toilet paper that cannot be hoarded, to prevent shortages," and it's because the TP biodegrades after 6 months.

Better than nothing.

Nvidia has done things like this before and it can get worse. Imagine a future GPU where only authorized drivers have access to certain features, and I'm not talking about the difference between consumer and workstation GPUs unlocking a few obscure openGL functions in the drivers.

Yes. A lot of what has angered me about the situation is that there's these claims that these companies are going to help us as consumers but aren't actually doing anything that helps us. It is just show. They know it, we know it. So stop saying you're on our side and stabbing us in the back. As an example, look at NewEgg's product shuffle. It is a clear scam and actively helps miners. Microcenter, BestBuy, Amazon, and everyone else does the same thing but NE is the worst because the bundling with useless stuff.

You want to help consumers? I have 2 models for you:

1) Create a signup list (like EVGA, but just select the number, not this list for every variant). Send out cards as they come in.

2) Only sell cards once or twice a month and in large pools (many cards in stock). This way you have a reasonable quantity of cards to hand out for the high demand instead of the small quantity that bots are always going to get to first. It should take only basic statistics to understand this. If a bot has an 80% chance of getting a product first and a consumer 20% then we need a bigger pool to draw from, not more pools (with small number of cards). More (small) pools helps the bots and harms the consumers. Larger and less frequent pools results in a larger set of consumers getting the products.

With these two models you can better fight bots and stock doesn't need to be on the shelves for long periods of time.

How is this even implemented?

Aside from the recent drought of GPUs and pricing madness, you could buy low-end current-gen cards that could outperform higher-end previous-gen parts.

I have the driver with it disabled and would patch diff it against a new one if I had the time, but I'm very busy with work. It would be an interesting problem of binary diffing at scale (dozens of libraries). Very interested if anyone has any insight.

Lots of people enter the pyramid because they have seen early investors benefit greatly and they want to benefit too. It works very well until people start getting out of the pyramid(selling) and the same thing happens in inverse, people want to recover the money they invested and price plummets.

There are two main reasons a big company like Nvidia can not mine for themselves:

1. Nobody will enter the pyramid in the first place just for enriching Nvidia. People enter a pyramid because they have seen their neighbor making money "out of nothing" and they get the Gold Rush themselves. Like a virus the Rush is contagious by people between them.

2. When prices go up everything is happiness and good feelings. When prices go down the people that have lost their savings will get mad at the company that benefited from their own ignorance or greed.

If they suddenly changed strategy like this, their stock price would be hammered instantly and there would be a clamour to replace their CEOs and boards.

Essentially, this move would wreck their basic business. And dropping that business for crypto is very risky. It is also probably not what investors would expect.

They'd have short term massive gains but it wouldn't be sustainable.

It's a way of artificially segmenting the market.

Bitcoin costs more to mine than the power bill you'll receive. This is why increasingly most malware happens by stealing power one way or another. And I don't think NVidia and AMD are in the stealing power business.

They're right where they want to be.

I wonder if the corporate psychology is similar to human psychology. In which, far from being run by a green field thinker like you, they are short-term oriented, and mainly backwards-looking for the sake of emotional security--we already know best what works for us.

It's not their business. They've built over the many years, a very defensible business out of expertise (and IP). That expertise is unique and resilient to the whims of a speculative investor hive-mind.

More practically, they just wouldn't be able to compete. Against companies that build ASICs specifically for mining, the tech they have, while is viable for the small-time gamer-miner demographic, does not have good returns on a larger economies of scale.

I can genuinely see a company like Nvidia getting a lot of customer feedback and maybe employees actually caring that gamers can get their hands on Nvidia's cards.

I suspect Nvidia's marketing team has grown too comfortable on consistently edging out AMD for ray tracing and isn't the sharpest bunch of tools in the shed.

As an admitted apologist, that's one of the weaker arguments. The most compelling to me is that power usage isn't properly compared to traditional banking. Sustaining all of the people and in person infrastructure required for traditional financial transactions requires more than just calculating the cost of transmitting the transaction. In fact those parts are comparatively cheap, it's the verification that's expensive, in both systems. All of the people employed in banks who play any kind of role have an enormous amount of cost associated with their employment. I'd like to see a comparison of heating and cooling costs for all of the banks in the world, which is just a small slice of the total cost of traditional banking, factored in to comparisons. The only one I've seen compared it to the computing cost for processing VISA transactions, which didn't seem like a proper comparison.

I'm also generally suspicious of some people (not everyone) who's gut instinct to environmental impact are limiting the spread of innovative and extremely useful ideas rather than looking at how to decrease the impact, particularly when those ideas help to decrease reliance on powerful central authorities. Proof of work is the innovation that allowed cryptocurrencies to scale to the level they are today, and it's precisely that work that allows them to operate securely despite being decentralized. Abandoning it because of the impact rather than reducing the impact would be like abandoning cars rather than making them electric and more efficient.

All of that isn't possible with the mining-focused line, so Nvidia feels they need other tools to help convince the cryptocurrency miners to move over, hence the block.

The problem is they want the mining cards to be more expensive per hash.

I don't want to mine cryptocurrency on my graphics card. So given the choice of buying an unrestricted one off ebay for $2500, or a restricted one for the originally suggested price of $800, I would rather buy the restricted one. Nvidia isn't being dishonest, they aren't throttling the cards they already sold, they aren't claiming anything is moral or immoral, they are just offering a new product that does exactly what I want for cheaper. So I'm certainly okay with it.

For example, they might believe that while selling to gamers is less lucrative than selling to miners in the short term, the gaming market will always exist while the mining market dries up the moment GPU mining is no longer profitable; so maintaining a good relationship with the gaming community is important for their long term health. Or maybe they're just tired of gamers yelling at them.

If you'd like to know how people are ok with this, it's been explained plenty already, right here in this discussion.

The government should never mandate that video card manufacturers do this, or don't do this.

If you don't like it, set up your own video card business that caters to crypto mining.

The vast majority of NVidia customers are applauding this move though.

This is the free market working, but if you're into crypto you may not like it because you're not winning the marketplace of ideas.

(And IMO if you support cryptocurrency you should appreciate this as well, because astronomically high GPU costs for gamers erodes the standing of cryptocurrencies in that demographic, it is very bad PR to just let GPU costs inflate -- people start to vehemently hate cryptocurrencies because of that effect).

Why would you prevent mining if some gamers do want to utilize their idle GPU power? Mining is supposed to be for everyone.

> adds the possibility that some workloads of non crypto currency origins fall foul of this in ways that may not be easy to discern.

So what? The proof is in the pudding. You buy things as they are sold, not with some kind of expectation that you can achieve 100% of the theoretical performance of some ideal version of the product. If I buy a car with a limiter that doesn't let me go over 100mph, I shouldn't be surprised or upset that I can't hit 105 mph.

That's kind of a bullcrap, since this 'niche' functionality completely crippled graphic card sales, and negative effects will ripple through PC gaming markets for quite some time. Every gamer that didn't manage to snatch one before is pissed beyond funny.

Imagine a gaming studio that is deciding to develop a next-gen game - why would they try hard to go for / optimize for PC version if there are very few actual owners of good cards? Produce either generic all-platform-compatible stuff or abandon PC market altogether.

ETH is the 2nd most popular crypto with a $394,657,267,540 market cap at $3,403.15 per as of the timestamp.

When you purchase a license agreement for software that the product depends on? Yes.

Don't really want to risk the situation getting even worse yet again, and even these computers going out of stock.

...I think I know why you can't get one. In all seriousness though, using GPUs for mining has trashed the gaming market and made entire realms of PC gaming inaccessible to lower income people, it's an incredible shame.

Just on time for ETH to move away from PoW! It's almost like NVidia waited for ETH

This might be good for the short-term, but it sets a precedent I'm really not happy with. I know they already do some of this with Quadro, but my understanding there is that the value add is in its reliability and certification, not ability to operate on workloads that have been artificially crippled on the gaming cards.