Sounds like it's time to crack some NVIDIA drivers. I already do it for the video encoding limitations, why not this too? Miners are willing to go to some really hacky extremes, reflashing firmwares, custom fan mods, extreme overclock configurations, etc to maximize hashrates and certainly won't care if they have to jump through some hoops to patch a specific version of the Linux driver or enable unsigned drivers on Windows, as long as they make more profit.
Good luck with this one NVIDIA but you're playing a losing game. As soon as one un-restricted version of the driver exists, this is as good as useless and demand will be the same as ever for these cards unless they're able to ship CMP cards at a very high rate, but my understanding is the restriction here is silicon.
Let's not forget that last time they produced "mining only" cards, people managed to crack the drivers to render graphics too... this is no exception.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Nvidia is effectively incentivizing the cracking of their driver and firmware security signing with millions of dollars. Because a person who cracks it can build a more profitable mining farm
It's a sort of accidental bug bounty and I wonder if Nvidia have really thought this through?
Indeed, I remember when I was doing some mining early in bitcoin's history. I had custom hacked BIOS on my AMD cards to be able to overclock beyond regular power limits. This flashing was possible only due to an exploit of the BIOS signature verification.
Given that I was doing this as only a rather casual miner with three GPUs, I have no doubt that this new restriction will be attacked ruthlessly.
Is it even in theory possible to produce silicon that does not perform well on crypto operations while allows 3D to run at full speed? Or do they simply rely on the same underlying operations?
wouldn't hashing be mostly int operations, while 3D graphics would be FP32? I dunno if they still do this, but nvidia used to artificially limit the rate for other float widths on geforce parts to segment the market.
Its not question if miners can/will crack it at some point (yes, they can). Question is how many miners will order the cards on day 0 without knowing if they can be used? The intention here is only to deter them enough that gamers have at least slightly better chance of getting these cards, and especially for launch-day orders.
Maybe it's time to create an adversarial network that can figure out how to mine on the GPU without causing it to halve the hash rate, train that network on an NVIDIA GPU, and shove it to them.
Good luck with this one NVIDIA but you're playing a losing game. As soon as one un-restricted version of the driver exists, this is as good as useless and demand will be the same as ever for these cards unless they're able to ship CMP cards at a very high rate, but my understanding is the restriction here is silicon.
Let's not forget that last time they produced "mining only" cards, people managed to crack the drivers to render graphics too... this is no exception.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TY4s35uULg4