For once all as per rumors, the revisions of Nvidia Ampere GPUs with the performance limiter in cryptocurrency mining (Ethereum and similar) they are arriving for real and to confirm it is the same US company.
I driver GeForce Game Ready 466.27 WHQL distributed in the past few hours (downloadable from here), in addition to supporting Metro Exodus PC Enhanced Edition, Mass Effect Legendary Edition e Resident Evil Village, “update the hash rate limiter for the GeForce RTX 3060 12GB, and is required for the product to be delivered from mid-May“, reads the release notes.
This means, as explained in previous news, that in the near future the GeForce RTX 3060 will have a GPU performance identical to that of the models already on the market, but since it will a new revision with a different PCI Device ID will not work with old drivers, requiring precisely only the versions from 466.27 onwards. On top of that, the card’s firmware could play a role in ensuring that simple driver mods get around the problem. According to initial analyzes, the PCI Device ID of the “new 3060” is 2504, while the previous cards are accompanied by the number 2503.
Nvidia’s goal is to restore the Ethereum anti-mining limiter on the RTX 3060, which literally went up in smoke after the release of a beta driver free of such “ploy” and with card support. This allowed miners to use the GeForce RTX 3060 in their rigs, even if they had to overcome a few hiccups (like this one).
By making the card less fast in mining, by halving its potential hash rate, Nvidia hopes to be able to put the product in the hands of more players, while diverting the public interested in undermining on CMP HX boards.
The “new” RTX 3060 will arrive on the market in a “silent” way, ie there will be no way to understand the type of GPU on board the purchased model from the box or from other details, but only by removing the heatsink (the new GPU is called GA106 -302) or (and is preferable) through monitoring tools such as GPU-Z that allow you to see the PCI Device ID.
Nvidia has not mentioned the other existing cards for now (RTX 3080, 3070, etc.), but we know that the US company is working to bring the limiter to all models and implement the Resizable BAR feature support from the factory. Obviously, this block will also not be missing on any new products such as the much talked about RTX 3080 Ti and 3070 Ti.