Taking a stance for gamers, Nvidia has announced that their upcoming RTX 3060 GPU card will have a hash limit in order to deter crypto miners to their new, dedicated for mining line of processors.
The news comes from a new blog post on the official Nvidia website, where the company states that the Geforce GPU are specifically designed for gaming.
We are gamers, through and through. We obsess about new gaming features, new architectures, new games and tech. We designed GeForce GPUs for gamers, and gamers are clamoring for more.
Yet NVIDIA GPUs are programmable. And users are constantly discovering new applications for them, from weather simulation and gene sequencing to deep learning and robotics. Mining cryptocurrency is one of them.
With the launch of GeForce RTX 3060 on Feb. 25, we’re taking an important step to help ensure GeForce GPUs end up in the hands of gamers.
By using a newly designed driver, RTX 3060 mining will limit hash rates by 50% when they have detected any crypto algorithm. While certainly good news, especially for gamers, this being the PC market there will no doubt be ways to around this limit.
However, in order to help satisfy the needs of miners, Nvidia will now be releasing the NVIDIA CMP, a Cryptocurrency Mining Processor designed for professional mining.
CMP products — which don’t do graphics — are sold through authorized partners and optimized for the best mining performance and efficiency. They don’t meet the specifications required of a GeForce GPU and, thus, don’t impact the availability of GeForce GPUs to gamers.
For instance, CMP lacks display outputs, enabling improved airflow while mining so they can be more densely packed. CMPs also have a lower peak core voltage and frequency, which improves mining power efficiency.
Creating tailored products for customers with specific needs delivers the best value for customers. With CMP, we can help miners build the most efficient data centers while preserving GeForce RTX GPUs for gamers.
The Nvidia CMP will be available for purchase from authorized retailer, though no release date has been given. Hopefully this helps ease the growing GPU demand due to crypto mining, though I guess well see how exactly well this works out next week when the GTX 3060 officially goes on sale.