Nvidia, the graphics chip company that wants to buy ARM, made an unusual announcement last week.
The company is about to launch the latest GeForce GPU, RTX 3060 chip, and wants users to know that the chip is “tailored to meet the needs of gamers and digital experience makers.”
Nvidia says:
Our GeForce RTX GPUs introduce cutting-edge technologies – such as real-time RTX ray-tracing, DLSS AI-accelerated image upscaling technology, fast Reflex response playback for the best system latency, and more.
Ray-tracing is an algorithm used to generate synthetic images that are almost incredibly realistic, correctly modeling complex optical interactions such as reflection, transparency, and refraction, but this type of realism has a huge computational cost.
Therefore, you can see why digital gamers and artists might be eager to get their hands on the latest special-purpose hardware that can speed up the creation of images rendered this way.
The horns of a dilemma
The dilemma facing modern GPUs, however, is that they are also quite good at performing cryptographic calculations, such as calculating hashes, such as SHA-2 and SHA-3, at high speed.
This type of algorithm is used in the center of many cryptocurrency mining calculations.
Therefore, you can see why cryptocurrency fans might be very eager to get their hands on the latest special hardware, which can speed up the calculations needed to earn cryptocurrencies.
This tension between graphics cards used for graphics and graphics cards used for cryptocurrencies has regularly led to the launch of new products from GPU manufacturers almost immediately, followed by the inevitable drop in prices by buyers who managed to get hold of retail stock. and then flip their cards for a quick online profit.
Selling many products can be a great result for GPU sellers, but artificial price inflation caused by a lack of stocks is a less welcome aspect for any mass company.
The company’s real customers – the end users who followed the product in the first place – end up feeling overwhelmed and upset by the company itself, not the buyers who were looking for money quickly.
Cryptomination is considered harmful
Therefore, for its new product, Nvidia has openly stated in advance that its RTX 3060 software drivers are deliberately biased against cryptocurrency:
With the launch of the GeForce RTX 3060 on February 25, we are taking an important step to ensure that GeForce GPUs reach the hands of gamers. […] RTX 3060 software drivers are designed to detect attributes specific to the Ethereum cryptocurrency extraction algorithm and to limit the hash rate or mining efficiency of cryptocurrencies by approximately 50%.
Nvidia will simply try to detect the code you’re running, and intentionally – but not secretly, given its public announcement – will eliminate what “denial of service” (DoS) actions are against software. which he thinks he’s trying to do calculations on the GPU.
If you want to do cryptocurrency, says Nvidia, you need to buy another product:
To meet the specific needs of Ethereum mining, we announce NVIDIA CMP [Cryptocurrency Mining Processor] professional mining product line. CMP products, which do not make graphics, are [… ]optimized for the best mining performance and efficiency. They do not meet the specifications required by a GeForce GPU and therefore do not affect the availability of GeForce GPUs for gamers.
What about Bitcoin?
If you’re a cryptocurrency enthusiast, you might be wondering why Nvidia is focusing here on Ethereum (and its associated cryptocurrency Ether or ETH) instead of the current media love of cryptocurrencies, Bitcoin (BTC).
After all, BTC calculations can be greatly accelerated with GPUs, just like ETH calculations.
However, Bitcoin extraction can be accelerated even more dramatically by using special chips built for the sole purpose of mining, so many BTC mining consortia scatter on custom mining hardware instead of buying general-purpose GPUs.
This is because BTC depends almost entirely on calculating SHA-256 cryptographic hashes over and over again, starting with a randomly chosen value each time.
However, Ethereum calculations currently use a strange mixture of several different hashes, some cryptographic and some simply bit-shaking hashes, based on inputs extracted pseudo-randomly from a huge pool of generated data. pseudo-random, known as data set.
This data set must be recalculated every few days, takes up gigabytes of memory, and must be directly accessible to RAM in all mining calculations.
That’s because the ETH algorithm, now known as Ethash but often mentioned by its original name and much cooler than Dagger-Hashimoto, has been specially designed to make fast computing on special hardware difficult.
Any dedicated Ethereum mining hardware should not only include custom and accelerated hash computing chips that could outperform your GPU, but should also be based on a higher-performance motherboard with better hardware for memory management and faster RAM than your gaming platform.
What about cryptocurrency?
The reports we’ve seen suggest that Nvidia’s anti-crypto drivers work by detecting memory usage that looks like a Dagger-Hashimoto calculation, which must follow unusual but inevitable memory access patterns, and reduce the speed of the ETH hash to half.
Unfortunately, this will not discourage cryptojackers – the name given to cybercriminals who implant malware that uses your computer to extract cryptocurrencies without permission.
Even if these new Nvidia drivers halve the earning rate of cybercriminals, scammers don’t pay for electricity (you are!), So any illegally exploited cryptocurrencies are still essentially “free money” for them.
We also wonder how long it will take for unofficial patches for Nvidia drivers to bypass the “Dagger Detector” deceleration code.
Hacking Nvidia drivers would break their digital signatures, but you can easily load modified and unsigned drivers on your Windows computer.