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Nvidia, the graphics chip company keen to buy ARM, made an unusual announcement last week.
The company is set to launch its latest GeForce GPU (graphics processing unit) chip, the RTX 3060, and wants its users to know that the chip is “designed to meet the needs of gamers and those who create digital experiences.” “.
Nvidia says:
Our GeForce RTX GPUs introduce cutting edge technologies, such as RTX real-time ray tracing, DLSS AI accelerated image scaling technology, Reflex ultra-fast response rendering for the best system latency , and many others.
Ray tracing is an algorithm used to generate synthetic images that are almost unbelievably realistic, correctly modeling complex optical interactions such as reflection, transparency and refraction, but this kind of realism comes at a huge computational cost.
So you can see why gamers and digital artists might be very keen to get their hands on the latest specialist hardware that can speed up the creation of images rendered in this way.
Horns of a dilemma
The dilemma that modern GPUs face, however, is that they are also good enough at performing cryptographic calculations, such as computing hashes like SHA-2 and SHA-3 at high speed.
This type of algorithm is used at the heart of many cryptocurrency mining calculations.
So you can see why cryptocurrency fans might be so keen to get their hands on the latest specialist hardware that can speed up the calculations needed to earn cryptocurrency.
This tension between graphics cards used for graphics and graphics cards used for encryption steadily led to the sale of new products from GPU manufacturers almost immediately, followed by the inevitable price increases by buyers who were able to get hold. retail stocks and then flip their cards for a quick online profit.
Selling a lot of product can be a great result for GPU vendors, but the artificial price inflation caused by stockouts is a less welcome aspect for any mainstream business.
The real customers of the business – the end users who searched for the product in the first place – end up feeling overwhelmed and aggrieved by the business itself, not the buyers who quickly cut corners.
Cryptomining considered dangerous
For its new product, Nvidia has therefore openly stated in advance that its software drivers for the RTX 3060 are deliberately biased against cryptomining:
With the launch of GeForce RTX 3060 on February 25, we’re taking an important step to ensure that GeForce GPUs end up in the hands of gamers. […] RTX 3060 software drivers are designed to detect specific attributes of the Ethereum cryptocurrency mining algorithm and limit the hash rate, or the efficiency of cryptocurrency mining, by around 50%.
Put simply, Nvidia will attempt to detect the code you are running and, deliberately – but not covertly, given its public announcement – will remove what amounts to “denial of service” (DoS) actions against the software it is running. think of trying to do Ethereum calculations on the GPU.
If you want to cryptomining, says Nvidia, you have to buy a different product:
To meet the specific needs of Ethereum mining, we announce the NVIDIA CMP [Cryptocurrency Mining Processor] range of products for professional mining. CMP products, which do not make graphics, are [… ]optimized for the best performance and mining efficiency. They do not meet the required specifications of a GeForce GPU and therefore have no impact on the availability of GeForce GPUs for gamers.
What about Bitcoin?
If you’re a cryptocurrency enthusiast, you might be wondering why Nvidia is focusing here on Ethereum (and its associated cryptocurrency Ether, or ETH) instead of the current cryptocurrency darling, Bitcoin (BTC). .
After all, BTC calculations can be greatly accelerated with GPUs, just like ETH calculations.
However, Bitcoin mining can be accelerated even more dramatically by using special chips designed for the sole purpose of mining, so many BTC mining consortia are getting into custom mining hardware instead of buying coins. General purpose GPU.
This is because BTC relies almost entirely on computing SHA-256 crypto hashes over and over again, starting with a randomly chosen value each time.
Ethereum’s calculations, however, currently use an odd mix of several different hashes, some cryptographic and others just basic bit-shaking hashes, based on inputs drawn pseudo-randomly from a huge pool of pseudo-randomly generated data known as database.
This dataset should be recalculated every few days, occupy gigabytes of memory, and should be directly accessible in RAM during all your data mining calculations.
This is because the ETH algorithm, currently known as Ethash but often referred to by its original and much cooler name of Dagger-Hashimoto, has been specially designed to make quick calculations difficult on specialized equipment.
Any dedicated Ethereum mining hardware should not only include custom and accelerated hash compute chips that could outperform your GPU, but also be based on a better performing motherboard with better memory management hardware and faster than RAM. your gaming platform.
What about cryptojacking?
Reports we’ve seen suggest that Nvidia’s anti-crypto drivers work by detecting memory usage which resembles a Dagger-Hashimoto computation, which must follow unusual but unavoidable memory access patterns, and in halving ETH hash speed.
Unfortunately, that probably won’t deter cryptojackers – the name given to cybercriminals who plant malware that use your computer to mine cryptocurrencies for them without authorization
Even though these new Nvidia drivers will halve cybercriminals’ win rate, crooks don’t pay for electricity (you are!), So illegally mined cryptcoins are still essentially ‘free money’ for them. .
We’re also wondering how long it will take for unofficial fixes to appear for Nvidia’s drivers to bypass the “Dagger-detector” slowdown code.
Hacking the Nvidia drivers would break their digital signatures, but on your own Windows computer, you can load the modified and unsigned drivers quite easily.
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