March 16, 2021 Nvidia confirms the mistake and has removed the official beta driver.
The RTX 3060’s the first GPU to be released with drivers that reduce Ethereum mining hash rates by 50%, as Nvidia tries to reserve GeForce cards for gamers rather than crypto miners. It was only a matter of time until the nerf was cracked, and now that it has been just three weeks after launch, stock issues of the card are predicted to worsen – and much like other Ampere or Big Navi GPUs, they aren’t easy to come by as it is.
Reliable leaker Ileakvn confirms that some RTX 3060 users are circumventing the mining nerf, but now, Videocardz reports that the latest official beta GPU driver removes the hash rate limiter from the card altogether – no hacking required, despite head of PR at GeForce, Bryan Del Rizzo, claiming that the anti-mining restrictions were “not just a driver thing”.
Nvidia has since told us that “a developer driver inadvertently included code used for internal development which removes the hash rate limiter on RTX 3060 in some configurations,” but it has since “been removed.” Despite its best efforts, however, the beta driver is already in the wild with reuploads occasionally rearing their head.
You can probably expect many more RTX 3060’s to end up in mining rigs rather than the best gaming PC now, despite the aim set out in Nvidia’s original blog post. Let’s hope Nvidia doesn’t repeat the mistake with the upcoming RTX 3080 Ti, rumoured to also be nerfed against ether mining applications.