Rumor: Nvidia Revisions RTX 30 GPUs With New Mining Restrictions
Rumor has it that Nvidia is planning to release new revisions of its current GeForce RTX 30 graphics cards. These GPUs would be equipped with a hashrate limiter, which should limit performance when mining cryptocurrencies.
VideoCardz sources claim that the new revisions of existing RTX 30 video cards will ship in May. The new video cards would not be recognized by the old beta driver, which bypasses the existing hashrate limiter of the RTX 3060, preventing cryptominers from using this driver to mine with the full hashrate of the GPUs.
Rumors have been circulating for some time about RTX 30 revisions with a hashrate limiter. Twitter user kopite7kimi claims, for example, that Nvidia may be working on such revisions of all current RTX 30 video cards. This leaker is usually well informed and published, for example, the correct specifications of the current RTX 30 line-up before release. For example, Nvidia could come up with revisions to the GA104 GPU from the RTX 3070 and the GA102 chip from the RTX 3080 and RTX 3090, all of which currently do not have a hashrate limiter.
On Thursday, HKEPC also reported that Nvidia would introduce a new variant of the RTX 3060 released in February. That video card already had a hashrate limiter at release, but Nvidia accidentally released a beta driver after release that disables these limitations. HKEPC also claims that the new RTX 3060 revision is not recognized by old drivers, so the driver that disables the hashrate limiter cannot be used either. HKEPC also claims that video cards with the new GPU revision will be delivered in May.
Nvidia would also have supplied a new variant of the as yet unannounced RTX 3080 Ti video card to GPU manufacturers, writes Igor’s Lab based on its own sources, who also share how the new revisions will be provided with a hashrate limiter. The RTX 3080 Ti would now be ready for mass production. The first batch of RTX 3080 Ti samples would work with the 470.05 beta driver, which circumvents the mining restrictions. This is not the case with the new revisions.
According to sources from Igor’s Lab, it is theoretically possible to put the old firmware on the new revisions and vice versa, although Nvidia would have found a way to counter this. Because the two revisions have different hardware IDs, flashing a different firmware would cause a black screen, effectively rendering the video card useless. The device IDs would remain the same, allowing future drivers to work on all different GPU revisions.