Nvidia has announced that it will be limiting its RTX 3060’s hash rate again from now on. The visual effects chips were made for gaming industry but found unwanted application in the huge Bitcoin mining industry during the last year or so, creating large scale shortage for the intended users of the graphics card.
Nvidia has been facing a recent dilemma with its GeForce RTX 3060 graphics cards. The chips were priced at a modest $329 and the company had designed them to take on the console gaming industry. The PC world was always deemed as a more expensive gaming option over the years with good systems costing in thousands of dollars. The console gaming setups including Playstations and Xboxes costed a fraction of the price of a good PC buildup and yet they performed almost just as good.
However, with the introduction of the Nvidia RTX 3060 graphics cards at half the price of their predecessors meant that the PC gaming industry had a new option that could drastically cut the money required to be able to build a state-of-the-art gaming system. But, Nvidia didn’t calculate at the time that miners were always in the hunt for new graphics cards with powerful hash rates. As a result, instead of the intended customers i.e. the gamers, the graphics cards were swooped up by big and small Bitcoin mining companies. When unleashed fully, the RTX 3060 cards had a hash rate of a mighty 118 Mega hashes, which is more than any other Bitcoin ASICs (Application Specific Integrated Circuits) being offered by dedicated mining chip manufacturing companies.
Now after a few half-baked attempts to limit the hash rate of the devices to discourage miners, Nvidia is now looking to release “Lite Hash Rate” graphics card models starting from May 2021 and onwards. Here is a short press release from the company:
Image source: Nvidia
The new cards will be completely identical to the cards before but their hash rate will be effectively halved, thus making Bitcoin mining virtually unprofitable through them.
However, not everyone is happy with the move. Many gamers are also part-time miners and use the cards for mining when they aren’t using them for gaming purposes. VideoCardz forum Eric W posted:
“Well this is a mixed bag. I want to buy a new gpu for gaming, but I also mine when I’m not actively playing games… I can’t buy a mining gpu because Nvidia seems to only sell them in quantities of several thousand and I have no interest in having 100s of mining rigs.”
It remains to be seen how the community will react to the release of the new cards. Stay tuned for updates.
Image source: Nvidia Corporation
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