We reported a few weeks back that Nvidia might be replacing its current RTX 3000 series GPUs with new GPU cores featuring a hardware-based anti-Ethereium mining limiter. But now according to Igor's Lab, there's more evidence for this plan with AIB partners being told on how to market these new 'mining limited' GPUs.
According to Igor, Nvidia is in the process of figuring out how to label these new GPUs, to make it easier for consumers to understand if they are getting an RTX 3000 graphics card that has the hardware-based mining limiter or not. For now, it seems Nvidia partners are free to market the new mining limited cards in whatever way they want, as long as the card can be identified as a mining limited card or not.
This is good news for gamers and miners. Letting consumers know if the Ampere card they are buying is mining limiter or not directly on the model name will yield less confusion overall. There's still some concern on how these will actually be labeled, however, with jokes of 'Limited Edition' or 'Gaming Edition' potentially have some painful truth.
There are also gamers that want to mine in their spare time, as a way to help recoup some of the cost of the graphics card. With cards like the RTX 3080 pulling in over $8 per day for the past several months (our how to mine Ethereum guide has addition details), plenty of people don't want artificially limited GPUs. AMD for its part has said it has no plans to introduce hash rate limiters, leaving it up to the end users to decide what they want to do with their cards.
Back to the Nvidia GPUs, previously, there was concern that the only way to identify the hash-rate limite cards would be through identifying the GPU core model. That would require actually purchasing and booting up a card. Which, you know, isn't really easy to do regardless, but whatever. If there's clear labeling, however, that's no longer a concern. Whether there will be enough cards to go around remains the bigger problem.
The various RTX 3000 cards rank among the best graphics cards, and they were already selling well above MSRP before the current Ethereum mining resurgence kicked off. Even if mining disappears, it's unlikely we'll see a return to 'normal' pricing any time soon.
