Nvidia says it won’t hurt Ethereum mining performance of existing GPUs

This morning, Nvidia announced that it will artificially reduce the performance of its upcoming GeForce RTX 3060 graphics card to $ 329 when it comes to a specific task: mining Ethereum cryptocurrency. As strange as this news might sound, it was music to the ears of some gamers – who had been trying and failing to get their hands on graphics cards for months due to the great GPU shortage, and blaming miners for part of it.

You might be wondering: what does this mean for other GPU? Nvidia is not yet talking about its plans for the future graphics card, but the company says The edge (in no uncertain terms) that it won’t nerf existing GPUs. “We are not limiting the performance of GPUs already sold,” said a spokesperson.

I was also a bit skeptical that the company’s new batch of CMP (Cryptocurrency Mining Processor) cards, marketed as an alternative for these miners, would mean gamers might actually be able to purchase an RTX 3060. If Nvidia is diverting its already limited production capacity from GPUs to CMPs, doesn’t that mean fewer gaming GPUs to start with? There’s a global semiconductor shortage, you know.

Image: Nvidia

But Nvidia strongly suggests that the new CMPs will not impact the ability to produce GeForce game cards. “The chips used for CMP could not meet GeForce specifications and have no impact on the capacity or overall availability of GeForce,” replied a spokesperson by email.

Although Nvidia does not confirm that it is talking about binning – the process by which chipmakers like Intel, AMD, Nvidia, and others take chips that are not 100% operational due to occasional manufacturing defects and sell them as slower or less feature-rich parts instead – the statement certainly sounds something like that.

But they may also be completely different. The photo you see above of Nvidia’s CMP looks nothing like the layout of Nvidia’s GA102 used in Ampere based RTX 3080 and 3090, or GA104 used in RTX 3070 and RTX 3060 Ti. It doesn’t look much like Nvidia’s previous generation Turing desktop chips. Maybe the CMP is just a GPU design that hasn’t been publicly disclosed.

If so, it’s vaguely possible that Nvidia has a stockpile of older chips that it uses. The company is bringing back the GTX 1050 Ti from 2016, after all, and it’s unlikely that Nvidia tipped over any of the RTX 30 series factories just for that to happen. But without knowing what the CMP is, Your guess is as good as ours.

Finally, you might be wondering: why only the Ethereum nerf mining, when other cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin have also made incredible gains? Here is Nvidia’s full response:

Ethereum has the highest global mining yield for all GPU-mineable parts at the moment and is therefore probably the main driver of GPU demand in mining. Other algorithms do not significantly contribute to GPU demand and this cannot change quickly due to network effects in a given cryptocurrency. The flow limiter applies to anything that uses Dagger Hashimoto or Ethash type algorithms.

We can’t wait to see if Nvidia can make the $ 329 GeForce RTX 3060 easier to buy than previous GPUs when it launches on February 25 at 12 p.m. ET. After months of round the clock hunting, I finally managed to catch a 3060 Ti a few weeks ago – hoping you don’t need to go that far.