Nvidia, the graphics chip company that wants to buy ARM, made an unusual announcement last week.
The company is about to launch its latest GeForce GPU (graphics processing unit) chip, the RTX 3060, and wants its users to know that the chip is “tailored to meet the needs of gamers and those creating digital experiences” .
Nvidia says:
Our GeForce RTX GPUs feature cutting-edge technologies – such as real-time RTX lightning tracking, DLSS AI accelerated image enhancement technology, super fast Reflex response rendering for the best system latency, and more.
Ray-tracing is an algorithm used in the generation of synthetic images that are almost unbelievably realistic, correctly modeling complex optical interactions such as reflection, transparency and refraction, but this type of realism has a huge computational cost.
You can therefore see why players and digital artists may be very interested in getting their hands on the latest special-purpose hardware that can speed up the creation of images rendered in this way.
Horns of a dilemma
The dilemma that modern GPUs face, however, is that they are also very good at performing cryptographic calculations, such as computing hashes like SHA-2 and SHA-3 at high speed.
This type of algorithm is used at the heart of many cryptocurrency mining calculations.
So you can see why cryptocurrency fans may be very interested in getting their hands on the latest special-purpose hardware that can speed up the calculations needed to win cryptocurrencies.
This tension between graphics cards used for graphics and graphics cards used for cryptomination has regularly led to new product launches from GPU manufacturers almost immediately, followed by the inevitable price manipulation by buyers who have managed to secure hold on retail stock and, in Then, flip your cards for a quick online profit.
Selling a lot of products can be a great result for GPU vendors, but artificial price inflation caused by out of stock is a less welcome aspect for any traditional company.
The company’s real customers – the end users who were after the product in the first place – end up feeling cheated and harmed by the company itself, not the buyers who bet quick money.
Cryptomineration considered harmful
For its new product, Nvidia has openly stated in advance that its software drivers for the RTX 3060 are deliberately against cryptomination:
With the launch of the GeForce RTX 3060 on February 25, we are taking an important step to help ensure that GeForce GPUs end up in the hands of players. […] The drivers of the RTX 3060 software are designed to detect specific attributes of the Ethereum cryptocurrency mining algorithm and limit the hash rate, or cryptocurrency mining efficiency, to about 50 percent.
Simply put, Nvidia will attempt to detect the code you are executing and purposely – but not secretly, due to its public announcement – to perform what amounts to “denial of service” (DoS) actions against software it thinks is trying to do Ethereum calculations on the GPU.
If you want to do cryptomineration, says Nvidia, you need to buy a different product:
To meet the specific needs of Ethereum mining, we are announcing the NVIDIA CMP [Cryptocurrency Mining Processor] line of products for professional mining. CMP products, which do not make graphics, are [… ]optimized for the best mining performance and efficiency. They do not meet the required specifications for a GeForce GPU and therefore do not affect the availability of GeForce GPUs to players.
What about Bitcoin?
If you’re a cryptocurrency enthusiast, you may be wondering why Nvidia is focused here on Ethereum (and its cryptocurrency Ether, or ETH) instead of the current cryptocurrency darling, Bitcoin (BTC).
After all, BTC calculations can be greatly accelerated with GPUs, just like ETH calculations.
However, mining Bitcoins can be accelerated even more dramatically using special-purpose chips built for the sole purpose of mining, so that many BTC mining consortia invest in custom mining hardware instead of buying general purpose GPUs.
That’s because BTC relies almost entirely on computing SHA-256 cryptographic hashes repeatedly, starting with a randomly chosen value each time.
Ethereum’s calculations, however, currently use an odd mix of several different hashes, some cryptographic and others simply basic bit-shaking hashes, based on inputs extracted pseudo-randomly from a huge pseudo-randomly generated data set known as The data set.
This data set needs to be recomputed every few days, takes up gigabytes of memory and needs to be directly accessible in RAM in all of your mining calculations.
This is because the ETH algorithm, currently known as Ethash but often referred to by its original and much nicer name than Dagger-Hashimoto, was specifically designed to hinder fast computing on special-purpose hardware.
Any dedicated Ethereum mining hardware would not only need to include custom, accelerated hash calculation chips that could outperform your GPU, but it would also need to be based on a better performing motherboard with better memory and RAM management hardware faster than your gaming equipment.
What about cryptojacking?
Reports we’ve seen suggest that Nvidia’s anti-cryptographic drivers work by detecting memory usage that looks like a Dagger-Hashimoto calculation, which needs to follow unusual but inevitable memory access patterns, and cutting the speed of ETH hashing in half .
Unfortunately, this should not discourage cryptojackers – the name given to cybercriminals who implant malware that uses their computer to extract cryptocurrencies for them without permission.
Even if these new Nvidia drivers halve the cybercriminals’ earning rate, criminals are not paying for electricity (you are!), So any illegally extracted cryptocurrency is still essentially “free money” for them.
We are also wondering how long it will take for unofficial patches to appear for Nvidia drivers in order to get around the “Dagger-detector” slow code.
Hacking Nvidia’s drivers would break your digital signatures, but on your own Windows computer you can load modified and unsigned drivers quite easily.