NVIDIA's hash rate limiter for its upcoming GeForce RTX 30 series graphics cards, such as the RTX 3060, may have been short-lived as cryptocurrency miners based in China have found a way to by-pass it using a custom mod.
NVIDIA GeForce RTX 30 Series Hash Rate Limiter Bypassed, GeForce RTX 3060 Shown Crunching Cryptocurrency at Full Mining Rate
Update: It seems like the mining algorithm used here wasn't Ethereum but Octopus which is a different cryptocurrency coin and based on an algorithm that NVIDIA might not have limited its hash rate for yet. So as of right now, the hash rate limiter remains in place but if other crypto-currencies can give out similar profits as ETH, then that doesn't stop miners from consuming the card for mining purposes.
NVIDIA itself was pretty confident about its hash rate limit for gaming-grade GeForce RTX 30 series graphics cards. The GeForce RTX 3060 was the first in the lineup to receive such treatment and the company stated that it will be hard to crack or even bypass based on how each aspect of the GPU was communicating with each other. The Hash Rate limiter worked by determining whether a set of mining algorithms were being run on the GPU and immediately halved the mining rate.
The whole process occurs through a secure handshake between the GPU, Driver, and the BIOS (Firmware). All three prevent the removal of the hash limiter. Now NVIDIA is quite confident that this would be enough to tackle miners running GeForce GPUs but at the same time, we can't be too sure about the overall effectiveness of this as VBIOS and driver mods could potentially allow miners to bypass the limit once again.
The NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3060 delivered around 40-45 MH/s but as soon as mining was initiated on the card, it dropped down to 20-25 MH/s. However, a Chinese mod is now floating around that will help miners unlock the full hash potential of the GeForce RTX 3060 graphics card. A picture spotted by I_Leak_VN shows the Geforce RTX 3060 crunching 45 MH/s in Ethereum using the Dagger Hashi-Motto algorithm. A total of 8 graphics cards were running in the system delivering a combined hash rate of 362.75 MH/s.
A Vietnamese Facebook group has also verified that this mod actually works and can deliver up to 50 MH/s on the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3060 graphics card. Such hash rate would mean that Crypto miners will now rush after the GeForce RTX 3060 graphics cards considering they deliver the same hash output as the RTX 3060 Ti and close to the RTX 3070 with a much lower power draw.
This will result in an imminent shortage of the only mainstream GeForce RTX 30 series gaming graphics card in the market and several people are reporting that they are expecting a large hike in prices given the demand for the RTX 3060 graphics card after this mod rolls out in public. Graphics cards such as the unreleased NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3080 Ti are also expected to feature the hash rate limit but if modders can bypass the RTX 3060, it's sad to say that the limit will also be bypass on the RTX 3080 Ti too.
News Source: I_Leak_VN
