Nvidia did a great deal on lowering the hash rate of Ethereum mining on its new RTX 3060 graphics card last month. A special system was supposed to make the RTX 3060 undesirable for cryptocurrencies, but Nvidia has now confirmed that it has accidentally unlocked those restrictions with a new driver.
“A developer driver inadvertently included code used for internal development that removes the hash rate limiter on the RTX 3060 in some configurations,” an Nvidia spokesman said in a statement to The Verge. “The driver has been removed.”
Although Nvidia has already removed the driver, the genie is out of the bottle. Nvidia’s latest beta 470.05 driver automatically unlocks performance for most RTX 3060 cards, increasing hashing rates for Ethereum mining. Driver mirrors can be easily found online, and Nvidia will not be able to prevent RTX 3060 owners from continuing to use this driver in the future.
Nvidia originally restricted the mining performance of the RTX 3060 in an attempt to prevent cryptominerators from buying the plates. The GPU manufacturer seemed confident that its restrictions could not be defeated, even claiming that it was not just a driver hampering performance. “It’s not just a driver thing,” said Bryan Del Rizzo, Head of Communications at Nvidia, last month. “There is a secure handshake between the driver, the silicon RTX 3060 and the BIOS (firmware) that prevents the hash rate limiter from being removed.”
Nvidia clearly did not expect to release a driver that would accidentally unlock its own restrictions.