A gentle balancing act has been taking place at GPU manufacturer Nvidia as it looks to welcome a new market of cryptocurrency miners all the while trying to keep its core gamer market happy.
Demand for its new range of RTX 30-series cards have been through the roof for a number of reasons, one being the hunger from crypto miners who capture the ire of gamers for their supposed misuse of the cards. Moreover, the price of the cards has skyrocketed due to the tight supply.
In order to try and tackle this, Nvidia employed driver software intended to halve the hashing power of these cards when it came to mining Ethereum. However, this seems to have flopped somewhat as images have emerged of Ethereum miners capturing high hashrates in these cards despite the limiter.
A new mod
It seems that the limiter has been breached thanks to a new mod which allows the full power of 50 MH/s to be reached. This emerged on the same day as the above screenshots in a cryptocurrency-focused Facebook group from Vietnam posted a graphic announcing that the RTX 3060 had indeed been bypassed.
This was all apparently achieved using a custom modification, according to reports. The mod comes not long after Nvidia’s global director of public relations, Bryan Del Rizzo, who said on Feb. 21 that secure interactions between the GPU hardware, the driver software, and the computer firmware would prevent the removal of the hash rate limiter.
“It’s not just a driver thing. There is a secure handshake between the driver, the RTX 3060 silicon, and the BIOS (firmware) that prevents removal of the hash rate limiter,” Del Rizzo wrote on Twitter.
A huge demand
The demand for these cards, not only from miners but from gamers as well, has seen these pieces of hardware as nearly impossible to get. It has even forced some miners to move towards buying up gaming laptops sswhich also have the RTX 30-series in them.
