Nvidia, the graphics chip company looking to buy ARM, made an unusual announcement last week.
The company is about to launch its latest GeForce graphics processing unit (GPU) chip, the RTX 3060, and would like to inform users that the chip is “tailored to the needs of gamers and those creating digital experiences.”
Nvidia says:
Our GeForce RTX GPUs introduce the very latest technologies – such as RTX real-time ray tracing, DLSS AI accelerated image upscaling technology, Reflex super-fast response rendering for the best system latency and much more.
Ray tracing is an algorithm used to generate synthetic images that are almost unbelievably realistic, correctly modeling complex optical interactions such as reflection, transparency, and refraction, but this kind of realism involves enormous computational costs.
You can therefore understand why gamers and digital artists are eager to get their hands on the latest dedicated hardware that can speed up the creation of images rendered this way.
Horns of a dilemma
However, the dilemma facing modern GPUs is that they are also quite good at performing cryptographic calculations, such as relying on high speed hashes such as SHA-2 and SHA-3.
This kind of algorithm is used at the heart of many cryptocurrency mining calculations.
You can therefore see why cryptocurrency fans are eager to get their hands on the latest specialty hardware that can speed up the calculations required to earn cryptocurrencies.
This tension between graphics-cards-used-for-graphics and graphics-cards-used-for-crypto mining has regularly resulted in new product releases from GPU makers selling out almost immediately, followed by the inevitable price hike by buyers who were able to love store inventory and then flip their cards over for a quick online profit.
Selling a lot of products can be a great godsend for GPU vendors, but the artificial price inflation caused by inventory shortages is a less welcome look for any regular business.
The real customers of the company – the end users who were on the product in the first place – end up feeling outsmarted and offended by the company itself, not the buyers who hit for quick cash.
Crypto mining is considered harmful
For its new product, Nvidia has therefore publicly stated beforehand that its software drivers for the RTX 3060 are deliberately biased against crypto mining:
With the launch of GeForce RTX 3060 on February 25, we are taking an important step towards ensuring that GeForce GPUs are in the hands of gamers. […] RTX 3060 software drivers are designed to detect specific features of the Ethereum cryptocurrency mining algorithm and limit the hash rate or efficiency of cryptocurrency mining by approximately 50 percent.
Simply put, Nvidia will attempt to detect the code you are using and will deliberately – but not secretly, given the public announcement – take measures amounting to denial of service (DoS) actions against software it believes to be Ethereum. tries to do. calculations on the GPU.
If you want to do crypto mining, Nvidia says, you need to buy another product:
To meet the specific needs of Ethereum mining, we are announcing the NVIDIA CMP [Cryptocurrency Mining Processor] product line for professional mining. CMP products, which don’t create images, are [… ]optimized for the best mining performance and efficiency. They do not meet the specifications of a GeForce GPU and thus do not affect the availability of GeForce GPUs for gamers.
What about Bitcoin?
If you’re a cryptocurrency aficionado, you may be wondering why Nvidia here is focused on Ethereum (and its associated cryptocurrency Ether, or ETH) rather than the current cryptocurrency media treasure, Bitcoin (BTC).
After all, BTC calculations can be greatly accelerated with GPUs, just like ETH calculations.
However, Bitcoin mining can be accelerated even more dramatically by using specialty chips built for the sole purpose of mining, so many BTC mining consortia are splashing out on custom mining hardware instead of buying generic GPUs.
That’s because BTC relies almost entirely on computing SHA-256 cryptographic hashes over and over, starting with a randomly chosen value each time.
However, currently Ethereum calculations use a weird mix of different hashes, some cryptographic and others just simple bit rudder hashes, based on input pseudo-randomly pulled from a huge pseudo-randomly generated data pool known as the dataset
This dataset must be recalculated every few days, takes up gigabytes of memory, and must be directly accessible in RAM during all your mining calculations.
That’s because the ETH algorithm, currently known as Ethash but often referred to by its original and much cooler name Dagger-Hashimoto, is specially designed to make it difficult to rely on special hardware quickly.
Any dedicated Ethereum mining hardware should not only include custom and accelerated hash computation chips that could outperform your GPU, but also be based on a better performing motherboard with better memory management hardware and faster RAM than your gaming rig.
What about cryptojacking?
Reports we’ve seen suggest that Nvidia’s anti-crypto drivers work by detecting memory usage that looks like a Dagger-Hashimoto calculation, tracking unusual but unavoidable memory access patterns, and cutting the rate of ETH hashing in half.
Unfortunately, this probably won’t discourage you cryptojackers – the name given to cyber criminals who implant malware that your computer uses to mine cryptocurrencies for them without permission.
Even though these new Nvidia drivers will cut the cyber criminals’ earnings rate in half, the crooks don’t pay for the electricity (you do!), So any illegally mined crypto coins are essentially still “free money” to them.
We also wonder how long it will take for unofficial patches to appear for Nvidia’s drivers to bypass the “Dagger detector” delay code.
Hacking the Nvidia drivers would break their digital signatures, but on your own Windows computer, you can easily load enough modified and unsigned drivers.