Does AMD need to announce its own GPU Hash Limiter to fight cryptocurrency mining?
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Tomorrow episode 3 of AMD’s Where Gaming Begins will introduce us all to the AMD RX 6700 XT graphics card. Here’s where we’ll get the basics on the specs and performance of the new Navi 22-based GPUs, ahead of a release sometime in mid-March.
But, inevitably, the first thing people ask about a new Radeon graphics card is: Can I buy one?
A second question related to the first would be: what exactly did you do to the miners?
The graphics card market is in a tough spot right now, to say the least. A perfect storm of pandemic-based production and supply chain issues, combined with the surge in demand from home PC gamers and the exponential growth in the profitability of GPU-based cryptocurrency mining, has created a market where it is nearly impossible Buy yourself a new card for something like MSRP.
Both the green team using the Nvidia RTX 3060 and the Radeon team using the AMD RX 6700 XT are looking to launch new mainstream GPUs. Yes, those cards with lower stickers and generally higher demand.
However, Nvidia has taken a bold stance on the RTX 3060, announcing that it will drop an uncrackable hashrate limiter on the card. The idea is that once the system discovers certain characteristics of the Ethereum algorithm, the GPU will cut its performance in half. This is by far the most popular — read: most profitable — cryptocurrency for GPU mining, and probably the biggest threat to graphics card availability right now.
In addition to this, Jen-Hsun’s gang also announced Nvidia CMP cards, which are adapters designed specifically for the mining market, using an older graphics architecture, and future versions appear to have the same GPU as the RTX 3080. Nvidia claims this means it could ease some of the burden on the GeForce crowd by offering an alternative to miners that don’t impact gaming card manufacturing.
(Image credit: Nvidia)
Whether this can or will work is another matter. For large-scale mining, just about any GPU can do it, but smaller-scale companies hope to make up for losses when the market inevitably goes through its general boom-bust cycle. If you buy a bunch of graphics cards, you can sell them to used gamers, and if you do it fast enough, you can also get back almost all the money you paid for them.
If you pick some mining-specific GPUs, they have no output, making them practically useless for gaming, and have very, very limited resale value. Especially if the market crashes as usual.
Will this really change anything? I don’t believe that the demand is so high that almost everything is a fair mining game these days, even gaming laptops.
But the point is, Nvidia has at least had a voice in addressing this issue. AMD? Well, I don’t think we’ve heard anything on this topic from Dr. Su’s happy GPU makers.
So, what does AMD need to say at tomorrow’s event, where does the game start Episode 3: Darkness? Does it even really need to say something about mining?
I did initially wonder if Nvidia’s own limiter would adversely affect AMD, pushing more miners in ways like the RX 6700 XT. However, as Jacob pointed out, if there is sufficient inventory, then it is possible, but since the limited graphics cards available have been targeted by miners, this will not have a blinding effect anyway.
(Image credit: AMD)
But at least it’s good to admit that this is the case, going beyond the often empty “we’ll have a good inventory of cards at launch” cliché. Although how much effort the red team should put in against GPU mining is of course up for debate.
Both AMD and Nvidia were hit hard by the 2017 rally and subsequent crypto mining crash in 2018. They all tried to cash in on their heyday by doubling down on manufacturing and creating specific mining SKUs of their GPUs. And when the crash happened, they all had to deal with a lot of excess inventory and a bloated market for used graphics cards.
I doubt AMD will be able to make any significant changes enough to handle the dual needs of miners and gamers separately. It’s better to simply try to create as many Radeon cards as possible with a limited number of 7nm Navi GPUs that it can squeeze out of a stretched TSMC, rather than redirecting some of it to a mining card with no output.
What about some kind of driver-based solution similar to Nvidia’s hashrate limiter on the RTX 3060? It feels like it might be something AMD, with its focus on open-source drivers for Linux — the OS of choice for finicky miners — that might automatically be ruled out. Open source drivers are seen as one of AMD’s biggest strengths on Linux, but it does mean less control at times like this. It might still be possible to add one to its Windows driver for some otherwise pointless PR win, but that seems like a waste of effort.
So yeah, it’s better for AMD to focus on making the RX 6700 XT the best midi-Navi graphics card it can, and make as many of them as possibleAfter all, there are early signs that the profitability of Ethereum mining is starting to decline, and if it continues to decline, this will start to have an impact on the demand for new graphics cards.
Last week the RTX 3080 could get you around $14/day by mining Ethereum, and today it’s down to $6/day. Sure, it’s still profitable, but how long is it really worth all the effort and the ecological collapse of civilization?
That’s why Nvidia has been hedging its bets against the mining crisis, rather than risking actually creating any new GPUs to support it. Of course CMP cards are focused on mining, but they’re also just old Turing-based chips, other than a potential future product that Nvidia isn’t obligated to actually release.
It’s old silicon that Nvidia has found a use for, just as Palit seems to be gearing up to repurpose those GTX 1060-based P106 mining cards we’ve mentioned again in the whispers around the EEC halls.
Finally, no, AMD doesn’t have to announce any sort of hash limiter in tomorrow’s livestream — even if it could. It’s also unlikely to announce any cryptocurrency-specific SKUs for its graphics cards. Mining and GPU availability may be mentioned, but AMD has been tight-lipped about both in recent history.
We’re more likely to see a new Navi graphics card that can compete between the Nvidia RTX 3060 Ti and RTX 3070, but the price levels are frustrating for some, and the stock levels are unnerving for everyone.
I’m still hoping we’ll see some sort of AMDLSS feature announced to take away the blues and provide a little performance boost for anyone who manages to equip themselves with an RDNA 2 GPU. Just for a little positivity, you know, but it’s probably just a pipe dream of mine right now.
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