You may have heard about the recent hash rate drop on Nvidia's RTX 3060 cards.
Nvidia Said that it was put in place to help get their new GPU's in the hands of gamers. Here are a couple of quotes from Nvidia's blog post:
“With the launch of GeForce RTX 3060 on Feb. 25, we’re taking an important step to help ensure GeForce GPUs end up in the hands of gamers,”
"RTX 3060 software drivers are designed to detect specific attributes of the Ethereum cryptocurrency mining algorithm, and limit the hash rate, or cryptocurrency mining efficiency, by around 50 percent."
This means that if you own an RTX 3060 and use it for cryptocurrency mining your profits are cut in half by a software lock purposely put in place. Nvidia also makes it sound like they are doing this more the benefit of gamers but this is false. While it may be true that the RTX 3060 may look less desirable for miners Nvidia released a new lineup of GPU's under the name CMP which stands for "Cryptocurrency Mining Processor" that is dedicated to miners and doesn't have these set backs that the other cards have.
However this doesn't solve more issues than it creates. For example when mining profitability becomes too low for miners to be able to use those cards they usually get sold on sites like Ebay and Offerup and other vendors. Gamers and other individuals are able to find discounted graphics cards on these markets and re-use them for another purpose. This can be considered a form of recycling. However the new CMP cards that Nvidia has announced cannot be handed down to others.
Another quote from Nvidia's blog post states:
"CMP products — which don’t do graphics — are sold through authorized partners and optimized for the best mining performance and efficiency. They don’t meet the specifications required of a GeForce GPU and, thus, don’t impact the availability of GeForce GPUs to gamers."
These GPU's do not have any display outputs which renders them completely useless to gamers. So what happens to these cards when mining profitability isn't profitable on them anymore? They don't get resold to gamers or other miners because they simply can't use them anymore. Once these cards have served their initial purpose the turn straight into E-Waste and most likely end up in a landfill.
Nvidia says they did this to help make both gamers and Miners happy but this is false. Nvidia set this up so that they can make more profits to benefit themselves instead of the community at the expense of not only the customer but the environment as well.
If anyone has thought's on this feel free to share.
