Nvidia's RTX 3080 Ti Could Have a Mining Limiter

News
By Aaron Klotz
published

The Ethereum mining limiter could apply to all future RTX 30 series SKUs

Nvidia GeForce RTX 3080 Founders Edition
(Image credit: Nvidia)

A well-known leaker with a stellar track record believes that Nvidia is planning to extend its Ethereum mining limiter, currently found in the RTX 3060 12GB, into the rumored RTX 3080 Ti. VideoCardz has also confirmed that Nvidia informed AIB partners that the mining limiter would be coming to the RTX 3080 Ti, making rumors for the existence of the RTX 3080 Ti even more likely.

There's also a chance this limiter could be coming to the rumored RTX 3070 Ti, as well. This news should come as no surprise to anyone, as Nvidia has already introduced new mining-specific graphics cards that will arrive in the next few months. Now it is in Nvidia's best interests, from a business perspective, to purposefully nerf future RTX 30-series GPUs hashrates to incentivize miners to grab Nvidia's mining-specific GPUs.

Luckily for some people, Nvidia's "older" RTX 30 series GPUs like the RTX 3090, 3080, 3070, and 3060 Ti will not receive the mining limiter. However, this might change soon, depending on Nvidia's plans.

But if an RTX 3080 Ti and RTX 3070 Ti are slated to come out later this year, Nvidia could be killing off the vanilla RTX 3080 and RTX 3070 to make way for the more powerful SKUs. If so, it wouldn't make much sense to go through all the extra effort of nerfing hash rates on the older Ampere GPUs (besides the 3060 TI) if they are to be discontinued anyway. 

We'll have to see how this plays out in the future. As of right now, you can make a decent amount of money on the RTX 3060 12GB despite having the mining limiter in place. If Nvidia begins having supply issues with its mining cards and miners start getting desperate, there's a good chance they will still buy any RTX 30-series GPU regardless. 

Aaron Klotz
Aaron Klotz
Freelance News Writer

Aaron Klotz is a freelance writer for Tom’s Hardware US, covering news topics related to computer hardware such as CPUs, and graphics cards.

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17 Comments Comment from the forums
  • Giroro
    A mining limiter doesn't help gamers, at all. It's just there so Nvidia can try to sell miners the same GPU on cheaply produced cards sold at higher prices. Plus those cards can never be sold to gamers on the used market. They unnecessarily become e-waste as soon as they lose profitability.

    At least that's what it does in theory. In reality the big mining operations knew how to bypass the locks before public availability (and had large numbers of 3060's before launch). So, the only people hurt by the locks are gamers who want to try and pay off their absurdly overpriced toy in their free time, but are unwilling to void their warranty.
    When a rich techbro or the Chinese mafia shows up with a briefcase full of cash to the backdoor of a shady warehouse, or a firmware engineer's tiny cube, or an executive's luxary suite - the cash gets what it wants.
    Reply
  • bigdragon
    The mining limiter for the 3060 had zero impact on the GPU's availability. Scalpers still rule the market, and miners will employ bypasses or mine other currencies. The 3080 Ti is just going to be another train wreck of a launch. If I were a big game publisher, I would be screaming at Nvidia and AMD to get hardware into the hands of gamers. These GPU (and console) shortages are going to have an impact on game sales if they haven't already.

    GPUs sell out in under 3 seconds on Amazon. Best Buy is a total waste of time between the "please wait" and then 'add to cart" button that shows up after stock is already gone. Microcenter will happily sell all their GPUs to the first person in line even if that was the same person first in line 2 days ago. Doesn't matter if it's the mining-limited 3060 or a different card. Nvidia's solution isn't working.

    The 3080 Ti needs to be sold via Steam or Epic. The normal retail and distribution channels are completely compromised. It's about time DRM did something for us gamers for once, and both those stores have robust DRM solutions that could easily limit 1 GPU, of any AIB, per 1 account that is at least 1 year old and owns at least 10 games.
    Reply
  • spongiemaster
    Giroro said:
    A mining limiter doesn't help gamers, at all. It's just there so Nvidia can try to sell miners the same GPU on cheaply produced cards sold at higher prices. Plus those cards can never be sold to gamers on the used market. They unnecessarily become e-waste as soon as they lose profitability.

    At least that's what it does in theory. In reality the big mining operations knew how to bypass the locks before public availability (and had large numbers of 3060's before launch). So, the only people hurt by the locks are gamers who want to try and pay off their absurdly overpriced toy in their free time, but are unwilling tho void their warranty.
    When a rich techbro or the Chinese mafia shows up with a briefcase full of cash to the backdoor of a shady warehouse, or a firmware engineer's tiny cube, or an executive's luxary suite - the cash gets what it wants.
    Large mining operations do not buy single cards from scalpers on Ebay. A large part of the reason prices are so high on ebay is because basement miners think they can make money with the card in the long run by mining when they aren't gaming. Who cares if you have to pay double MSRP, if you can make that cost up in a couple months mining? This is an easily provable theory by comparing the prices of GPU's that have different memory capacity configurations. 4GB cards that can't mine ethereum are still high, but a fraction of the price that 6 or 8GB variants of the same GPU are selling for. So, in theory, crippling the mining ability of cards actually should lower the prices for gamers. There are going to be far fewer people willing to pay double or more MSRP if they know they can't make that cost up in a reasonable amount of time mining on the side, which will lower scalper prices.
    Reply
  • SyDiko
    bigdragon said:
    The mining limiter for the 3060 had zero impact on the GPU's availability. Scalpers still rule the market, and miners will employ bypasses or mine other currencies. The 3080 Ti is just going to be another train wreck of a launch. If I were a big game publisher, I would be screaming at Nvidia and AMD to get hardware into the hands of gamers. These GPU (and console) shortages are going to have an impact on game sales if they haven't already.

    GPUs sell out in under 3 seconds on Amazon. Best Buy is a total waste of time between the "please wait" and then 'add to cart" button that shows up after stock is already gone. Microcenter will happily sell all their GPUs to the first person in line even if that was the same person first in line 2 days ago. Doesn't matter if it's the mining-limited 3060 or a different card. Nvidia's solution isn't working.

    The 3080 Ti needs to be sold via Steam or Epic. The normal retail and distribution channels are completely compromised. It's about time DRM did something for us gamers for once, and both those stores have robust DRM solutions that could easily limit 1 GPU, of any AIB, per 1 account that is at least 1 year old and owns at least 10 games.

    They need to do away with online ordering - that would immediately solve the bot problem.

    Then, just take in store pre orders... Problem solved.
    Reply
  • bigdragon
    SyDiko said:
    They need to do away with online ordering - that would immediately solve the bot problem.

    Then, just take in store pre orders... Problem solved.
    That won't work either. The store employees tip off people as to when new GPUs are coming in stock. There's a line every morning before the local Microcenters open with new GPUs. Depending on who is working, the first person in line may only get 1 GPU or they may be permitted to buy all the GPUs -- quantity limits are not always enforced. Nothing stops the same person from returning a few days later to do it all over again. There are always more people in line than GPUs available.

    The only way to fix this is to use all that rich account data from gamer storefronts to separate actual gamers from miners. Then enforce a quantity limit to kick out the scalpers. Scalpers can't just register more accounts because there would ideally be an age-of-account requirement, hours spent gaming requirement, and/or number of games owned requirement.

    I don't even think queues are a serious option. EVGA's queues are all the way back on September and October of last year -- 6 months ago. Granted, EVGA splits their supply between multiple retailers and their queue.
    Reply
  • Co BIY
    With crazy Bitcoin prices the nerfing of the cards may just result in miners buying twice as many cards total.

    Oh, I see what they are doing now... probably not an unintended consequence.
    Reply
  • Giroro
    spongiemaster said:
    Large mining operations do not buy single cards from scalpers on Ebay. A large part of the reason prices are so high on ebay is because basement miners think they can make money with the card in the long run by mining when they aren't gaming. Who cares if you have to pay double MSRP, if you can make that cost up in a couple months mining? This is an easily provable theory by comparing the prices of GPU's that have different memory capacity configurations. 4GB cards that can't mine ethereum are still high, but a fraction of the price that 6 or 8GB variants of the same GPU are selling for. So, in theory, crippling the mining ability of cards actually should lower the prices for gamers. There are going to be far fewer people willing to pay double or more MSRP if they know they can't make that cost up in a reasonable amount of time mining on the side, which will lower scalper prices.

    I'm really not sure how mining is affecting ebay prices, outside of modern GPUs not making it into the retail stream to begin with. I was joking about the Mafia making shipping containers full of GPUs disappear out the back door of warehouses, but maybe that's not actually too far from the truth.
    What I do know is that everything with GDDR memory is gone from retailers. Everything. Even cards completely worthless for mining/gaming like the GT 710. AMD's APUs are also nearly impossible to find at retail and are therefore also being scalped.
    I had the smart idea to sell my GTX 1080 while prices are high, but I need a basic gpu to at least run an internet browser while I wait. Turns out the only place local in town with any GPU at all is staples selling a DDR3 GT 210 for $90ish. Although I could drive 4 hours round-trip to pick up a 1GB DDR3 GT 710 for around $60. So I thought "hey maybe I'll just get an Athlon 3000G for $50ish and move that to a NAS or something later". Nope, they're gone too outside of scalpers trying to double their money on Amazon.

    So my bright Idea to pick up a sub $50 office-grade GPU to run my Ryzen PC while the market calms down simply isn't an option this week.

    I also learned that you can order multiple different customized Dell/alienware PC builds for roughly the current ebay price of the GPU you pick. So to anybody about to buy an eBay GPU today, you absolutely should buy an entire computer instead
    Reply
  • jkflipflop98
    It has to be in hardware or its useless. If they're banking on a line of software to get the job done, they're idiots.

    Develop a mining ASIC and sell that. I mean we've been in this crypto fad for years now and no one has capitalized on this insanity by offering a mining ASIC. That shows you how stupid the big tech companies really are.
    Reply
  • PapaCrazy
    Giroro said:
    I had the smart idea to sell my GTX 1080 while prices are high, but I need a basic gpu to at least run an internet browser while I wait. Turns out the only place local in town with any GPU at all is staples selling a DDR3 GT 210 for $90ish. Although I could drive 4 hours round-trip to pick up a 1GB DDR3 GT 710 for around $60. So I thought "hey maybe I'll just get an Athlon 3000G for $50ish and move that to a NAS or something later". Nope, they're gone too outside of scalpers trying to double their money on Amazon.

    So my bright Idea to pick up a sub $50 office-grade GPU to run my Ryzen PC while the market calms down simply isn't an option this week.

    I was tempted to sell my GTX1080 too. Its used value is close to what I paid for it new. But gotta have a leg to stand on. I admire your adventurous spirit though. I'm sure there's a board out there to fit your temporarily humble needs.
    Reply
  • ufo43615
    The only way this problem is going to be fixed is if mining on gaming GPUs is disabled entirely, and miners are forced to buy CMP cards if they want to mine anything.
    Reply