Nvidia to release new RTX 3080, 3070 and 3060 Ti with mining restriction at the end of May – Computer – News

Nvidia RTX 3080, 3070 and 3060 Ti GPUs that will be released from the end of May have a new restriction to throttle crypto mining performance. The measure should make the cards more available to gamers.

Nvidia will release GeForce driver 466.47 on Tuesday and in the releasenotes it states that this driver is mandatory for the RTX 3080, 3070 and 3060 Ti with LHR due out at the end of May. In a blog post Nvidia writes that the abbreviation stands for Light Hash Rate and that the limitation only applies to new video cards and not to previously produced GPUs. The LHR variants will be recognizable with a logo on the box and in price lists.

Nvidia does not provide substantive technical details about the mining restriction. The earlier limitation introduced with the RTX 3060 had the effect of halving the hashrate when mining Ethereum. It seems this is the same with the new LHR variants.

There have been longer rumors about the arrival of the LHR video cards and in recent days details of LHR video cards from different manufacturers appeared. Gigabyte and Zotac have already posted information about the LHR video cards on their websites. The GPUs are unchanged from the existing variants and the performance will be no different in games.

Earlier this year, Nvidia with the RTX 3060 already a mining restriction in. However, that block was lifted after Nvidia released a beta driver for developers, with that restriction not activated. That happened according to Nvidia by accident.

To what extent the mining restriction will improve the availability of the video cards remains to be seen. Video cards have been very scarce for months and are sold for amounts well above the suggested retail price. Tweakers wrote one background article about the causes of shortages and price increases.

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