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It looks like there could be more to it than just a driver behind the artificial reduction in GeForce RTX 3060’s cryptocurrency performance. Finally, anti-crypto measures seem to occur with previous GeForce RTX 3000 models already released.
As we announced yesterday, Nvidia will add some to the new GeForce RTX 3060 graphics cards protection or perhaps more of a “repellent” so that these cards are not bought by cryptocurrency miners. Although mining will work on them, but with reduced output. Originally, there was only talk of a driver, but now we have more information that this “DRM” will go deeper into mining. And it could also have much bigger consequences, in the end it could get back to higher models.
A test of a Zotac card that has already reached someone has already shown what mining restrictions will look like in practice: once launched, the mining application had full performance (meaning that this is not the case if it is artificially reduced by the compiler), but fell in about a minute “Hashrate” by about the announced half. So there is probably some monitoring of the running load, which will not intervene immediately.
However, performance limitation is probably not a matter for the driver. It has already been confirmed that it will apply to both Windows and Linux, and it should probably be enforced by the card’s firmware so that it cannot be bypassed so easily. According to Nvidia’s PR director Bryan Del Rizzo, the protection has more elements and probably uses cryptographic verification of the running driver, but probably also the firmware, so that the restriction cannot be removed.
Hi Ryan. It’s not just a driver thing. There is a secure handshake between the driver, the RTX 3060 silicon, and the BIOS (firmware) that prevents removal of the hash rate limiter.
– Bryan Del Rizzo (@bdelrizzo) February 19, 2021
The mention of a “secure handshake” between the chip, firmware and driver leads to the hypothesis that Nvidia may have used what we know as a Secure Boot for a PC. This would mean that the graphics firmware would only allow you to use a signed driver with it (forcing the miner to use a hacked driver with full cryptographic performance). But according to some leaks, the card firmware cannot even be flashed to disable this protection, which would mean that the GPU is locked to accept only the official signed firmware again. It would therefore not be possible to circumvent protection at this level either. Therefore, a complete “chain of trust” would be used, from the GPU itself to the driver.
This would have the side effect that the hardware will be much more locked than in the past, and the question is what this will mean for Noveau’s open drivers on Linux. AMD, which uses open drivers in the kernel on Linux, might not be able to take such action, because then only signed binary drivers would be accepted, which does not work with the “driver is embedded in the kernel” model.
Other GeForce RTX 3000 may also be available
In a previous article, we wrote that with the RTX 3060, this protection is made possible by the fact that the card will now be on the market, while with other Ampere, miners could simply continue to use old drivers, so it doesn’t make sense for them to do this in the driver as well. But it looks like Nvidia could work around the problem.
What I said.
The old specs and device-ids of gaming cards will EOL.???? https://t.co/hSjEmifanh– kopite7kimi (@ kopite7kimi) February 18, 2021
According to leaker Kopite7kimi (he seems to have known about this measure against miners in advance), he plans to stop the current variants of RTX 3060 Ti, RTX 3070, RTX 3080 and RTX 3090 cards and replace them with new ones with changed Device ID, so they will not accept old drivers. And they would probably also have locked firmware loaded from the factory and active protection against flashing.
At the same time, Nvidia could change the specifications of these cards (increase the beats, add units and even memory, which has been speculated about since the release of Ampere). But it is also possible that he will simply use the same specifications as before, just change the identifiers. Such modified cards could start selling quietly without any notice, so customers would not even know they had bought an anti-crypto card – until they tried to use an older driver (provided we only see what it will be like with the Noveau driver on Linux).
Tip: Cryptocurrency miners are already buying gaming laptops with GeForce RTX 3000 mobile phones
