JAMES GORBOLD / HARDWARE ACCELERATED
James Gorbold has been building, tweaking and overclocking PCs ever since the 1980s. He now helps Scan Computers to develop new systems.
OPINION
W
ith much of the population in lockdown over the past
year and a half, there’s been unprecedented worldwide
demand for gaming GPUs. On top of that, the huge
rise in value of some cryptocurrencies has created additional
massive demand for GPUs. In addition to ramping up production,
Nvidia’s response has been twofold. Firstly, to develop a new
range of dedicated mining GPUs, the CMP HX series, although
these have yet to seen in the wild, so it’s impossible to judge
their desirability to miners.
Nvidia’s other response is an attempt to reduce the
attractiveness of its 30-series GPUs to miners, thereby freeing
up stock for gamers. The first GPU to get this treatment was
the RTX 3060, with a driver that detected
when the Ethereum mining algorithm
was being run and halved the hash rate,
making it less profitable for mining and
in theory less desirable to miners.
This has now been improved with a new
mining speed limiter, which uses a secure
handshake between the driver, the GPU and the graphics card’s
BIOS to reduce performance. This technology, known as Lite
Hash Rate (LHR), is present in the newly launched RTX 3070 Ti
and 3080 Ti, which are reviewed in this issue, plus RTX 3080,
3070 and 3060 Ti cards made from late May onwards.
You can spot these newly made RTX 3080, 3070 and 3060
Ti cards by the addition of ‘LHR’ in the name of the cards.
These LHR cards only reduce the Ethereum mining speed,
however, not mining other cryptocurrencies, gaming or
rendering performance.
While I’m not a fan of cryptocurrency mining, as it consumes
vast amount of electricity and hardware yet barely has any
intrinsic value or purpose, I was curious to gauge the effectiveness
of this LHR mining speed limiter on these new GPUs.
Comparing one of the new RTX 3070 LHR GPUs with an
original 3070 was revealing. Using Phoenix Miner, the Ethereum
hash rate dropped from 52MH/sec on the original to 25MH/sec
on the LHR card, a drop of 48 per cent. By way of comparison,
the RTX 3070 Ti which has LHR baked into the design, mined
at 38MH/sec – 29 per cent slower than the original RTX 3070.
This is enough of a performance drop to make Ethereum
mining far less attractive and potentially unprofitable on LHR
GPUs. What’s more, unlike the first implementation of LHR on the
RTX 3060, which was controlled solely by the driver and was soon
cracked, returning 3060 cards to full mining
performance, the second implementation
of LHR seems more secure, and hasn’t been
cracked at the time of writing.
As such, while new GPUs such as the
RTX 3070 Ti and 3080 Ti are by no means
revolutionary, merely providing stepping
stones between existing GPUs, they’re more important than the
benchmark and price data would suggest. The LHR technology
is, if you’ll forgive the expression, a game changer, as the new
GPUs are no longer so desirable to miners.
That said, LHR alone won’t open the floodgates and see
a deluge of GPUs suddenly being available to gamers. The
sheer demand and backlog of orders for GPUs worldwide,
plus ongoing shortages of components, mean it will take
months for GPU availability and prices to return to normal.
Still, LHR is the first genuinely good step in the right direction
I’ve seen from any GPU manufacturer – AMD and Intel had
better be taking note.This performance drop is
enough to make Ethereum
mining far less attractiveMINING VS GAMING,
ROUND TWO
James Gorbold takes a closer look at Nvidia’s second attempt
to make more GPUs available to gamers