Due to the recent Ethereum craze, videogamers can't even get their hands on Nvidia's latest cards as the latter are being purchased for mining.
Nvidia made a decision to decrease the hash rate of their newest graphic cards since they are mostly being used by cryptominers rather than gamers. GeForce RTX 3080, RTX 3070, and RTX 3060 Ti are big hits among the miners due to their powerful GPUs. However, the company is limiting the performance of their graphic processing units to make the cards less useful to cryptoheads. As Nvidia states in the blog, RTX 3060 software drivers are designed to detect specific attributes of the Ethereum cryptocurrency mining algorithm and limit the hash rate by about 50 percent.
This change will not affect the existing GeForce RTX 3080, RTX 3070, and RTX 3060 Ti. The new, slowed down cards are going to be labeled as "LHR" or "Lite Hash Rate". Matt Wuebbling, Nvidia’s head GeForce marketing is hoping that this measure will help the company "get more GeForce cards at better prices into the hands of gamers everywhere.” The LHR edition RTX cards will start shipping this month.
Nvidia already has a processor designed specifically and exclusively for cryptocurrency mining. NVIDIA CMP HX was made for professional mining as one of the company's attempts to help the gamers reclaim GeForce cards. CMP HX has amazing performance for mining but cannot handle graphics, unlike RTX cards.
It is expected that the downgrade-update will make the existing GeForce RTX cards way more expensive as they have not been affected by the change. Also, it is possible that the next card in the RTX family is going to have LHR as well.
You can find more details in Nvidia's blog. Also, don't forget to join our new Telegram channel, our Discord, follow us on Instagram and Twitter, where we are sharing breakdowns, the latest news, awesome artworks, and more.