In recent weeks there has been talk of the arrival of new revisions of Nvidia Ampere GPUs of GeForce RTX 3000 cards aimed at implementing the performance limiter to cryptocurrency mining (not all, mainly the algorithm behind Ethereum) and enable support for Resizable BAR without requiring a BIOS update.
According to the latest rumors published by Videocardz, this process of silent renewal of the cards presented up to now (also the RTX 3060) will start in mid-May, with shipments of the new chips to partners. The “new cards” could then begin to arrive in the hands of players during the course of June.
“Our sources have been pretty clear as to that Nvidia has no plans to differentiate these chips (internally defined by Nvidia as “Lite Hash Rate”) from existing models. All the cards will have the same name and the only way to distinguish them from the previous solutions will be to check the GPU “or alternatively turn to more convenient monitoring tools such as GPU-Z that allow you to check the PCI Device ID of the card.
The revision of the GPU is functional precisely a change the PCI Device ID and thus make the card incompatible with existing drivers. The limiter, which halves the performance with some mining algorithms, is in fact linked to both the driver and the firmware of the cards, but as we have seen with the RTX 3060, if a compatible driver without this block is entered in circulation, then it is not so difficult to overcome the other hitches and use the GPU to mine at full power.
In terms of features and performance, the new revisions will be absolutely identical to the previous ones, so don’t expect any surprises. Nvidia’s goal is clearly that of curbing miners’ purchases of GeForce cards so that the availability increases and the products reach the players’ hands. According to a source from Videocardz, “the RTX 3090 may be the only card not to feature the limiter”, as the profit from this model would be reduced due to the high list price. However, this model will also receive a “new GPU” to get Resizable BAR support from the factory.
Resizable BAR, which AMD calls Smart Access Memory (SAM), is a PCI Express protocol feature that allows the CPU to directly access all of the video card’s memory (VRAM) without constantly accessing small parts (256MB). The goal is to speed up the entire data access process and achieve greater game performance (the amount often depends on the title and can be affected by the resolution, but on average it is about 5-10%).
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