We’ve been living in the GPU apocalypse for the past eight months. A global shortage of semiconductors brought on by logistical issues caused by the COVID-19 pandemic meant that pretty much everything more complicated than a toaster is suddenly in short supply, and that includes both consoles and graphics cards.
On top of that, demand for the latest Nvidia GPUs is sky-high. That’s both because gamers want to get their hands on the latest and greatest technology to run new games, but also because cryptocurrency miners need to keep their edge in order to maintain a steady flow of digital currency.
These two groups have sucked every video card out of the market, pushing prices for a new GPU on sites like eBay to double or even triple their MSRP–and that’s if you can even find a GPU to bid on.
Nvidia acknowledges that its products are useful for more than just gamers in its latest blog update, but it also realizes that gamers are its biggest customers. So to keep gamers happy, Nvidia just announced its future plans to put hash limiters on future graphics cards.
“Today, we’re taking additional measures by applying a reduced ETH hash rate to newly manufactured GeForce RTX 3080, RTX 3070, and RTX 3060 Ti graphics cards,” Nvidia wrote in today’s blog post. “These cards will start shipping in late May.”
These graphics cards will be labeled “Lite Hash Rate” or “LHR” on the box to denote the existence of the hash limiter. Note that this will only apply to new graphics cards produced and not to existing RTX cards.
Nvidia put a similar hash rate limiter in the RTX 3060 when it went on sale earlier this year. At the time, Nvidia said that the limiter couldn’t be bypassed, but weeks later we found reports of the 3060 being used to mine for cryptocurrencies. Soon after that, Nvidia accidentally released a version of the 3060s drivers that removed the hash limiter entirely.
That’s all to say we’re not entirely sure how effective this hash limiter will be at stopping cryptominers from scooping up every available GPU and just bypassing the limiter. Here’s hoping they’ve improved their anti-tampering tech since the 3060’s release.
