Nvidia, the graphics chip company that wants to buy ARM, made an unusual announcement last week.
The company is about to launch its latest GeForce GPU (graphics processing unit) chip, the RTX 3060, and wants its users to know that the chip is “tailored to meet the needs of gamers and those creating digital experiences. “.
Nvidia says:
Our GeForce RTX GPUs introduce cutting-edge technologies such as real-time RTX ray tracing, DLSS AI-accelerated image augmentation technology, Reflex fast response rendering for the best system latency, and many more. month.
Beam tracing is an algorithm used to generate almost incredibly realistic synthetic images, correctly modeling complex optical interactions such as reflection, transparency, and refraction, but this kind of realism has a huge computational cost.
So you can see why digital gamers and artists may be very interested in getting the latest special-purpose hardware that can speed up the creation of images represented in this way.
The horns of a dilemma
The dilemma facing modern GPUs, however, is that they are also quite good for performing cryptographic calculations, such as computer hashes like SHA-2 and SHA-3 at high speed.
This type of algorithm is used at the heart of many cryptocurrency mining calculations.
So you can see why cryptocurrency enthusiasts may be very interested in getting the latest special-purpose hardware that can speed up the calculations needed to earn cryptocurrencies.
This tension between graphics cards used for graphics and graphics cards used for cryptomine has regularly caused GPU manufacturers to re-release, almost immediately, followed by the inevitable price reduction for part of the buyers keep the stocks retail and then exchange their cards for quick online profits.
Selling too many products can be a big result for GPU vendors, but artificial price inflation caused by stock shortages is a less welcome look for any conventional company.
The real customers of the company, the end users who were looking for the product in the first place, end up feeling overwhelmed and annoyed by the company itself, not by the buyers who were looking for money quickly.
Cryptomine is considered harmful
Therefore, for its new product, Nvidia has openly stated in advance that its software drivers for the RTX 3060 are deliberately biased against cryptomine:
With the release of GeForce RTX 3060 on February 25th, we are taking an important step to ensure that 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 about 50 percent.
In a nutshell, Nvidia will try to detect the code you’re running and, intentionally, but not covertly, given its public announcement, will eliminate any “denial of service” (DoS) actions against software that it believes try to do Ethereum calculations on the GPU.
If you want to make cryptomine, says Nvidia, you have to buy a different product:
To meet the specific mining needs of Ethereum, we announce the NVIDIA CMP [Cryptocurrency Mining Processor] professional mining product line. CMP products, which do not make graphics, are [… ]optimized for the best mining performance and efficiency. They do not meet the required specifications for a GeForce GPU and therefore do not affect the availability of GeForce GPUs for gamers.
What about Bitcoin?
If you’re a cryptocurrency enthusiast, you may be wondering why Nvidia is focusing here on Ethereum (and its associated cryptocurrency Ether, or ETH) instead of the current beloved cryptocurrency, Bitcoin (BTC).
After all, BTC calculations can be greatly accelerated with GPUs, just like ETH calculations.
However, Bitcoin mining can be accelerated even more dramatically by using special-purpose chips built for the sole purpose of mining, so many BTC mining consortia come out in custom mining hardware instead of buy general purpose GPU.
This is because BTC relies almost entirely on computing SHA-256 cryptographic hashes over and over again, starting with a randomly chosen value each time.
Ethereum’s calculations, however, currently use a strange mix of several different hashes, some cryptographic and some simply basic hash that shake bits, based on pseudo-randomly extracted entries from a huge pseudo-randomly generated dataset data set.
This dataset needs to be recalculated every few days, takes up gigabytes of memory, and must be directly accessible to RAM during all mining calculations.
This is because the ETH algorithm, currently known as Ethash but it is often referred to by its original and much fresher name Dagger-Hashimoto, was specifically designed to hinder fast computing in hardware for special uses.
Any Ethereum mining hardware should not only include custom, accelerated hash computing chips that could outperform your GPU, but should also be based on a better performance motherboard, with memory management hardware. better and faster RAM than your gaming platform.
What about cryptoacking?
Reports we’ve seen suggest that Nvidia’s anti-cryptographic drivers work by detecting memory usage that looks like a Dagger-Hashimoto calculation, which should follow unusual but inevitable memory access patterns, and reduce hash speed ETH in half.
Unfortunately, this is not likely to discourage cryptojackers – the name given to cybercriminals who implement malicious software that your computer uses to extract cryptocurrencies without permission.
While these new Nvidia drivers will halve the cybercrime revenue rate, thieves don’t pay for electricity (it is!), So illegally extracted cryptocurrencies remain “free money” for to them.
We also wonder how long it will take for unofficial patches to appear on Nvidia drivers to avoid the “Dagger-Detector” deceleration code.
Hacking Nvidia drivers would break your digital signatures, but on your own Windows computer you can load modified, unsigned drivers easily enough.