Whilst Nvidia’s stated that already-released RTX cards won’t be nerfed to reduce hash rates in Ethereum mining, it looks as though the yet to be announced RTX 3080 Ti will follow in the anti-mining steps of its smaller RTX 3060 sibling, according to credible hardware leaker Kopite7kimi.
According to the tweet, the RTX 3080 Ti will reportedly launch with drivers designed to deliberately reduce Ethereum mining efficiency, just like the RTX 3060, where hash rates are reduced by up to 50%. The aim is to deter cryptominers from snapping up the card, which should bolster stock for gamers, but it hasn’t stopped the RTX 3060 from suffering the same stock issues that we’ve seen hinder every GPU launch since September.
It’s difficult to tell just how effective this mining nerf is at reinforcing stock for gamers, as it only targets the one type of cryptocurrency and the limitations were revealed so late in the RTX 3060’s launch that miners ended up listing the cards on Ebay. If it means gamers can get their hands on the RTX 3080 Ti, however, then the expectedly large price jump between the two isn’t going to deter many.
Kopite7kimi hasn’t added anything to their Tweet last month that the VRAM in the RTX 3080 Ti would be dropped from 20GB to 12GB – the same amount of memory found in the cheapest card in its Ampere range, the RTX 3060, albeit with faster GDDR6X technology.
It will have 12G 19Gbps VRAM and an ETH mining nerf too.
— kopite7kimi (@kopite7kimi) March 4, 2021
If this turns out to be a standard practice with every new GeForce card released, it’s something to be welcomed. After all, Nvidia now caters to cryptominers with its new dedicated CMP cards, anyway.