We may earn a commission when you buy through links in our articles. Learn more.

Nvidia nerfs RTX 3060 against mining, says “GeForce is made for gaming”

A win for gamers, but will it reduce stock woes?

The stock issues with AMD and Nvidia’s latest graphics cards have led to massively over-inflated prices on resale. Part of the high demand for the latest GPUs can be attributed to their great performance in crypto mining applications, although it’s leaving a shortage of consumer graphics cards being used for what they’re actually designed for – gaming.

The prices of Nvidia’s upcoming RTX 3060 have already been surging before launch, but the card might suddenly become much less attractive to the mining community, in light of fresh news from an Nvidia blog post titled “GeForce is made for gaming”. The software drivers for the 3060 will be programmed to deliberately reduce performance when crypto mining applications are detected, the post explains, reducing the mining hash rate by up to 50%.

Nvidia isn’t saying goodbye to miners, however – it plans to release a new lineup of dedicated mining cards called the Nvidia CMP (Cryptocurrency Mining Processor) range, which will have no display capabilities. It also goes on to say that these new mining cards “don’t impact the availability of GeForce GPUs to gamers”. Let’s hope so.

So, will this good news help if you’re looking to pick up an RTX 3060 next week? It might reduce demand somewhat, but the number of new GPUs wanted from gamers alone is off the charts too.

Plus, the RTX 3060 will not be completely unusable for mining applications – just 50% less efficient, so crypto miners might still try and pick one up.