Nvidia's LHR limiter has been bypassed, enabling full mining performance

[Squid Surprise]

Not sure If Techspot covered the story
2 days ago source IGN, PCgamer
Nvidia Fined $5.5 Million For "Inadequate Disclosures" Of Sales To Crypto Miners
SEC cites that Nvidia misled how crypto miners were impacting the sale of its GPUs.

FYI

Exactly my point! They love miners... they just don’t want to APPEAR to love them...

 

[godrilla]

Exactly my point! They love miners... they just don’t want to APPEAR to love them...

Obviously they love them they just wanted miners to pay a premium for non LHR which was the 3090. Miners had to pay for multiple cards to get same hash rate or purchase the 3090. Also miners were able to make a workaround in less than a month or so and boasted that the lhr method used was made with little to no effort. I wonder what is the difference between the workaround last year and this new method.

"However, this might not be as bad as it sounds, as Ethereum is expected to soon switch to a Proof-of-Stake algorithm."

Oh yeah, is that so...

At this point I only see POS either being forced by regulations due to energy utilization and or mining becoming a burden to mine where mining is becoming in a net negative income ( or constant loss) with no end in sight or whichever comes first. If the impact is small the outcry will be minimal ( miners are also potential holders of Ethereum that can short it on a mass scale). Although I believe mining profitability not necessarily exclusive to Ethereum will have waves of profitability.

 

[zamroni111]

I believe is a cost savings measure even though it doesn't seems like one: Nvidia basically works on a single core architecture. After they're done with it they actually develop both their enterprise/compute solutions in software to match and also their gaming features: I believe this is why Nvidia launched ray tracing and specially DLSS when they did which was a result of including tenser cores on the shared architecture since those were on demand for certain workstation/enterprise workloads and then find a way to take advantage of them on the gaming software suit like saying "Hey let's just use this ML compute power to implement stuff useful to gamers like Machine Learning based scaling tech"

Obviously I am greatly over-simplifying things here today but instead of having 2 separate lines of chips they develop one and then adapt needs on either side of the consumer or enterprise equation to utilize the hardware features regardless of the situation.

And in that regard well, miners really are just compute customers that have so much demand and so little actual requirements for compute than they can do as efficiently with consumer products, in fact even more so since expensive features like ECC memory for vram is not something that impacts hash rate so the consumer product is more cheaper since it's optimized for them better, by accident.

Mining sha hashing only needs strong integer performance while real compute use cases needs strong fp64.
Gaming needs fp32 at max.

As seen done by amd, differentiating compute and gaming gpu will allow nvidia to use expensive latest end euv fabrication for high margin compute gpu while low margin gaming gpu stays at cheaper duv fab.

It also beneficial for availability as duv has higher production rate than euv.
While rdna 2 duv availability is bad, it's just amd maximising capital usage on higher margin zen3

 

[Lounds]

I'd be interested in trying this but currently the prices in the UK for electricity have doubled since last year. So last year 13-15p kWh now you're talking 28p-34p kWh.

 

[Eldritch]

Problem : Falling product prices before launch of overpriced next gen.

Solution : LHR gets cracked to give a short term boost to price.

I am surprised that people are surprised.

 

[Squid Surprise]

Obviously they love them they just wanted miners to pay a premium for non LHR which was the 3090. Miners had to pay for multiple cards to get same hash rate or purchase the 3090. Also miners were able to make a workaround in less than a month or so and boasted that the lhr method used was made with little to no effort. I wonder what is the difference between the workaround last year and this new method.

No... they simply saw that their 3080, 3070, etc were in limited supply so didn't need the miners to sell out... now that production is on the rise, they need miners again... shockingly, the hash rate limiter doesn't work any more - never saw that coming!

 

[Darth Shiv]

That's interesting to see. I haven't tried any mining on my card for almost a year. Last time I tried Nicehash my LHR 3080 was getting around 55MH/s. I just tried nicehash again and without dinking around with anything I'm getting about 65MH/s.

Still not worth it, if you ask me. I'd much rather spend my time gaming with the card and not running it 24/7 to mine. Even if I got it up around 90MH/s (according to the image in the story) it wouldn't be worth it.

Nice effort by Nicehash, but it might be too little, too late.

Did you use the correct release? You need the RC not the stable release channel to get the unlock. And yes you should get over 80MH/s.

 

[wiyosaya]

Surprise, surprise!

 

[PEnnn]

And nGridia is still laughing all the way to the bank after their B$ LHR stunt (whose code was deliberately weak and was cracked within a week of release!)

 

[Skjorn]

It's not just nice hash. It's not just windows.

That's interesting to see. I haven't tried any mining on my card for almost a year. Last time I tried Nicehash my LHR 3080 was getting around 55MH/s. I just tried nicehash again and without dinking around with anything I'm getting about 65MH/s.

Still not worth it, if you ask me. I'd much rather spend my time gaming with the card and not running it 24/7 to mine. Even if I got it up around 90MH/s (according to the image in the story) it wouldn't be worth it.

Nice effort by Nicehash, but it might be too little, too late.

My LHR 80 does 102MHs. You either don't have any tune setup or using the wrong version of nicehash. I'm going to guess both.

 

[hwertz]

I hadn't realized LHR was only cutting performance for hashing like 20-30%. I mean, it doesn't matter, if it's effective (in keeping people from buying cards just to mine) then it's effective. I just assumed it was a much higher drop than that.

 

[bviktor]

Good. What a great 2 months it's gonna be! Ethereum PoW will be gone really soon.