Nvidia releases driver to limit mining on RTX 3060 GPUs

On April 29, Nvidia announced a new GeForce driver 466.27 to further limit the hash rate of the RTX 3060 based on the Ampere GA106-302 processor, as reported by VideoCardz.

With the transition to the new GPU, the card has been assigned the PCI device ID 2504 and is now incompatible with earlier drivers.

Source: Nvidia.

Going forward, drivers will be released for the entire new RTX 30 line under the Lite Hash Rate name, the rollout of which is planned for mid-May.

The main difference for these GA10X-XX2-based models will be a built-in hash rate limiter, which will render the devices unsuitable for cryptocurrency mining. The exception will be the RTX 3090.

Additionally, the new line will gain support for the [Resizable BAR] feature for gamers Resizable BAR for gamers.

The company expects the restrictions it has introduced in the RTX 30 series to prompt miners to buy specialized Nvidia CMP HX devices.

Earlier in February, Nvidia decided to halve the hash rate of the GeForce RTX 3060 desktop GPU. It explained this was aimed at aligning the model with gamers’ needs and asserted that the protection could not be bypassed.

Later, Chinese miners claimed that using an unnamed algorithm allegedly cracked the protection and boosted the device to 50 MH/s. The report did not receive official confirmation.

Subsequently, the RTX 3060 performance limits were bypassed using an experimental Nvidia GeForce 466.11 driver. At that time, only a single card of this model was successfully bypassed. The company confirmed the presence of a bug and removed the software from its site.

At the end of March, an enthusiast from South Korea built a mining farm of seven RTX 3060s, bypassing the hash-rate restrictions for Ethereum mining. The farm’s total hash rate was 337 MH/s. The miner did not specify how he managed to bypass the GPU protection.

In April, Nvidia announced plans to replace the processor in the GeForce RTX 3060.

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