Miners say Nvidia's cryptocurrency limiter hasn't deterred them from buying GPUs: 'LHR was pointless'
Nvidia's attempts to block cryptocurrency miners from making a profit with its GeForce RTX 30-series gaming GPUs may not have had the desired effect. In fact, mining platform NiceHash tells PCMag that it «did not discourage miners at all.»
The Lite Hash Rate (LHR) mining limiter was implemented by Nvidia as a deterrent to cryptocurrency miners gobbling up the limited GeForce graphics card stock available over the past few years—worsening the impact of the ongoing silicon shortage on PC gaming. It essentially put a brake on hash rate when the GPU detected it was being used for the purposes of Ethereum mining.
Nvidia's first attempt to implement LHR was bungled by its own driver release, which circumvented the limiter in some cases. Miners swiftly figured that one out, so Nvidia tried again and in a large part succeeded to implement LHR on a large scale.
Nowadays, all new RTX 30-series GPUs are fitted with the hash rate limited, even though they're not always denoted as LHR specifically. This, Nvidia believed, would result in "more GeForce cards at better prices into the hands of gamers."
The current market wouldn't suggest this to be the case, though it's tough to discern actual sales figures and which cards go where after sale. At least according to miners speaking to PCMag, though, LHR hasn't been as great of a deterrent as we would have hoped.
“Yes, I feel LHR was pointless,” Blake Teeter says.
Teeter is a cryptocurrency miner based in Colorada, and has around 95 GPUs to mine with in total, around 20 of which are LHR cards.
He says LHR «isn't a deal breaker for miners.»
Another miner, Tim Tarshis, who owns nearly 30 LHR GeForce RTX 3060 graphics card, says that he bought these because there were more of them available
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