Nvidia Limits Mining Efficiency On RTX 3060

Nvidia has announced that they will be reducing the efficiency of Ethereum mining on its RTX 3060 series by 50%, in an effort to ease the shortage of graphics cards caused by crypto miners.

For over 2 years, graphics cards – usually snapped up by avid gamers – have seen numerous shortages, causing their prices to skyrocket on secondary markets. Between scalpers and miners, the market is tense – a move that has caused Nvidia to step in, hoping to restore high-end GPUs to their intended purpose.

However, in order to not leave crypto miners orders unfulfilled, Nvidia is also launching a GPU dedicated specifically for miners – the CMP .

Focused Due To Highest Yield Potential

To explain why they have specifically lowered the hash rate on the 3060 series, Nvidia stated that Ethereum has the highest global mining yield of any other cryptocurrency at the moment.

“It has the highest global mining yield for any GPU-mineable coin at the moment and thus is likely the main demand driver for GPUs in mining.”

By making Ethereum mining less efficient, Nvidia hopes it can deter miners from focusing on gaming GPUs and drive them towards their new dedicated CMP cards.

According to Nvidia, the CMP will remove focus from the graphics a high-end gaming card would be able to render and turn that power towards more energy-efficient mining processes.

However, critics have met this claim with a measure of skepticism – stating that more efficient mining hardware will do nothing to stop the card arms race – since miners with these cards will simply be competing against other miners with the same cards now, not against miners with regular graphics cards.

It’s worth noting that the current shortages have not only made the prices of GPUs skyrocket, but that of mining rigs as well, with some companies having their inventory sold out for the foreseeable future.