Thursday, October 13th 2022
NVIDIA Removes Hashrate Limiter for RTX 30-series LHR GPUs in the Latest Driver
In a last-ditch effort to clear inventory of its GeForce RTX 30-series "Ampere" graphics cards, NVIDIA has reportedly removed the hashrate limiter in the latest GeForce 522.25 drivers, without mentioning it anywhere in the driver's release notes. A Redditor and GeForce RTX 3080 Ti owner by the username "Timbers007" rested that their card, which launched exclusively as LHR-enabled graphics cards (with no RTX 3080 Ti cards without LHR in circulation); is now achieving double its usual hashrates when benchmarked with ethminer. It's able to put out 112 MH/s, a hashrate only possible with mining software that circumvents the LHR limiter, such as NiceHash or NBMiner.
In the thick of the graphics card shortage in 2020-21, as crypto currency miners were buying up inventory of gaming graphics cards through sophisticated retail bots; NVIDIA attempted to sour the milk for miners by introducing LHR (lite hashrate), a supposedly hardware-level limitation that cripples the mining performance of the GPU. This failed to improve things as NVIDIA accidentally released drivers without the hashrate limiter early on and redacted them, but not before they spread among miners. It was only a titanic crash in crypto-currency values, and the recent Ethereum merge that killed GPU-accelerated mining, which arrested demand, bringing RTX 30-series GPUs to prices more acceptable to gamers, as miners began flooding the market with their used GPUs at much lower prices. Will this improve sales of the RTX 30-series? Unlikely. Miners with RTX 30-series LHR graphics cards who already had the hacks to circumvent the limiter, are dumping their cards.
Sources:
VideoCardz, Timbers007 (Reddit)
In the thick of the graphics card shortage in 2020-21, as crypto currency miners were buying up inventory of gaming graphics cards through sophisticated retail bots; NVIDIA attempted to sour the milk for miners by introducing LHR (lite hashrate), a supposedly hardware-level limitation that cripples the mining performance of the GPU. This failed to improve things as NVIDIA accidentally released drivers without the hashrate limiter early on and redacted them, but not before they spread among miners. It was only a titanic crash in crypto-currency values, and the recent Ethereum merge that killed GPU-accelerated mining, which arrested demand, bringing RTX 30-series GPUs to prices more acceptable to gamers, as miners began flooding the market with their used GPUs at much lower prices. Will this improve sales of the RTX 30-series? Unlikely. Miners with RTX 30-series LHR graphics cards who already had the hacks to circumvent the limiter, are dumping their cards.
62 Comments on NVIDIA Removes Hashrate Limiter for RTX 30-series LHR GPUs in the Latest Driver
*google translated*
The fact they think this will sell cards makes them look idiotic and out of touch.
This won't shift a single GPU since mining is still dead and I know because I KNOW not think.
G-Sync, DLSS etc etc. lol when will people learn... wait for it, wait for it, DLSS 3.0... soon...
On a side note, I wonder if this is why we get a little extra DX12 performance?
Nvidia Said LHR ONLY affected one type of Hashing algorithm so someone either chatted total balls Or it's coincidental.
According to other sites All RTX cards got a Dx12 boost from the latest drivers.
Nvidia can eat shit.
When NVIDIA accidentally leaked out an unaltered driver to developers that didn't have the LHR limiting code activated, miners were able to use this discovery to create their own workarounds for later drivers that did have the LHR enabling code.
The actual LHR limiter is in hardware. Remember that the initial version of the RTX 3080 did not have this code and ETH mining was never throttled by any driver software in these early units. Same with the 3090 cards which also never had LHR. They mined at full speed too.
Internally NVIDIA probably never used the LHR-blocking drivers in house which led to them fumbling the ball by letting it accidentally leak out just that one instance.
NVIDIA simply removed the software switch to enable LHR in the cards that have the hardware code with the 522.25 driver release.
Two different concepts.
What convinces you to believe that NVIDIA will do what's "best" for gamers here in late 2022?
After all, they pair these GPUs in the lab with different combinations of VRAM from different vendors at different memory bandwidths, at different speeds, etc.
And from all those experiments, they come up with one or two combinations that will make it as a final product.