Nvidia kills mostly meaningless crypto-mining limiter on RTX 30-series GPUs
Nvidia no longer blocks ethereum (ETH) mining on its graphics card, roughly one month after the second-most valuable cryptocurrency moved away from GPU mining altogether.
Nvidia's Lite Hash Rate (LHR) cryptocurrency limiter(opens in new tab) was released alongside the RTX 3060 as a way of dissuading cryptocurrency miners from buying up all the available stock of the graphics card at launch. It would also roll out to other GeForce GPUs manufactured after that time. LHR was released as a supposedly untouchable implementation across hardware and software, which would detect an ethereum mining workload and slow the graphics card down to lower its profitability. However, following a shaky start, LHR would eventually become mostly, if not entirely, circumventable.
Some miners even called LHR «pointless.»(opens in new tab)
Following ethereum's shift from a proof-of-work algorithm, one which required GPU mining to validate the blockchain; to a proof-of-stake algorithm, which uses consensus of validators instead, LHR has become even more pointless. The Merge, as the move is known as, took place on September 15, 2022, and reportedly no other cryptocurrencies are proving profitable enough(opens in new tab) for GPU miners to jump ship.
Ethereum mining is dead and Nvidia's LHR no longer has any purpose.
That might be why, according to recent reports from Reddit(opens in new tab), via Twitter leaker I_Leak_VM(opens in new tab) and Videocardz(opens in new tab), Nvidia has removed the LHR limiter from its cards completely. Many people are replying to social threads confirming an increase in hash rate on LHR GPUs with the new drivers, up to their non-LHR hash rate, and we've also tested the new drivers out on our test bench.
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