The Nvidia Geforce RTX 3060 with mining limitation will be launched in May

Rarely previously seen demand among gamers and mining of the cryptocurrency Ethereum is behind the great shortage of graphics cards. To curb this, Nvidia, with a previous driver, has tried to stifle mining performance, an attempt that failed after its own fad. Recently, it has been rumored that Nvidia will take stricter measures at the hardware level, something that is now confirmed.

It also updates the hash limiter for the GeForce RTX 3060 and is required for products shipped starting mid-May 2021. Please refer to our NVIDIA Blog for further details.

When Nvidia presents the news in the latest driver Geforce Game Ready 466.27 WHQL, it appears that a new hash limiter for Geforce RTX 3060. At the same time, it appears that the new driver, or a later version, is required for new RTX 3060s that are delivered to the end customer starting in mid-May 2021.

Current changes to the new Geforce RTX 3060 confirm previous information that Nvidia has changed its PCI Device ID, which completely sonic breaks compatibility with previous drivers without hash limiter. The new RTX 3060 gets the ID loop “NVIDIA_DEV.2504”, unlike today which in the drivers’ .inf file is referred to as “NVIDIA_DEV.2503”.

To date, Nvidia’s attempts to limit mining performance have been limited to the Geforce RTX 3060, which is likely due to the fact that it is in a price range that is normally where the large sales volumes for gamers is located. However, there are many indications that Nvidia plans to introduce the restriction on most Geforce RTX 3000 graphics, also there through the same approach with new PCI Device ID loops.

The new graphics circuits all get the “2” extension at the end and, in addition to breaking compatibility with older drivers, should not affect game performance. Exactly which models are covered is not completely clear, but some information indicates that only Geforce RTX 3090 is excluded as Nvidia considers that the model is still too expensive to be relevant for miners.

Nvidia continues to emphasize that Geforce is in favor gamers and refers miners to the company’s latest series Cryptocurrency Mining Processor (CMP), which is based on older graphics circuits that were originally in the Geforce RTX 2000 series.

What do you think about Nvidia restricting the mining performance of Geforce 3000 graphics cards?