An anonymous tech Twitter account on March 10 mailed a screenshot on the dashboard with the caption “Dammit Chinese mod.”
The tweet suggested that Chinese Ethereum miners would successfully circumvent the limitation Nvidia uses in its RTX 3060 GPUs to mine ETH. The screenshot showed that the RTX 3060 GPUs deliver a normal hash power of 45 MH / s, far above the alleged 50% hash beat limit announced by Nvidia last month.
The information quickly spread across both gaming and crypto publications, picking up the news, citing the Twitter account as the source who said Chinese miners had “allegedly” circumvented Nvidia’s hash rate hike on Ethereum. The problem: this is not true.
None of the Chinese Ethereum miners or pool operators that The Block spoke to said they saw an actual solution that could bypass the RTX 3060 GPU limiter to deliver a hash rate performance of more than 40MH / s not.
However, this would have been a significant development, because when Nvidia launched its latest RTX 3060 GPUs last month, the company said it was being implemented. a safe way to reduce 50% of the GPU’s computing power when used to exploit ETH. Meanwhile, Nvidia is launching a new processor chip specifically dedicated to cryptocurrency mining.
The curb and the launch plan are part of the chipmaker’s efforts to offer a balanced offering to meet the demands of both gamers and crypto-miners.
But the fact that the wrong information quickly raised eyebrows and made headlines within hours offers a glimpse of the seemingly irreconcilable tension – at least for now – between players and miners.
This is because rising mining revenues have allowed operators to buy as much stock as possible, which has increased market prices. Some even turn to games laptops to squeeze out an extra hash rate.
According to industry experts, it is virtually impossible to crack Nvidia’s GPU hash rate constraint. Bryan Del Rizzo, RTX Product Manager at Nvidia, said in a tweet last month that the restriction is not limited to a software update.
“It’s not just a driver. There’s a secure handshake between the driver, the RTX 3060 silicone and the BIOS (firmware) that prevents the removal of the hash speed limiter,” Del Rizzo tweeted. He did not respond to a request from The Block for comment on this article.
Kristy-Leigh Minehan, a crypto-mining expert who was previously at Core Scientific and Genesis Mining, suggested that it would take some insider work to do the trick.
“To work around this, you need a private NVIDIA key to sign a custom driver and VBIOS implementation [and] the tool used to do VBIOS modifications’ phones at home ‘to Nvidia, the same with drivers (on their build servers) so that they will record all this information,’ she said in an instant message to The Block.
Simply put: “[The] only way to get around it is an NV [Nvidia] employee with both a signed VBIOS and a new driver version, ‘she added with a laughing emoji.
So, what caused all the fuss?
It appears that the Twitter account that leaked the original image from the dashboard only confirmed hours later that the screenshot had been misinterpreted.
The same account posted a follow-up tweet to explain that the screenshot is not related to the Ethereum power performance. It was rather related to Conflux, another proof-of-work blockchain network that is not subject to Nvidia’s hash limit.
The account tweeted another screenshot showing how the RTX 3060 GPUs actually deliver a reduced hash rate of 25MH / s.
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