NVIDIA’s Lite Hash Rate Limiter Is Pointless, Cryptocurrency Miners Say

The Litecoin miners that were given the new software found it so ineffective they refused to install it and are refusing to accept Nvidia’s payment. News of the miner issue has caused a ripple in cryptocurrency mining, with some people suggesting NVIDIA should charge more for its GPUs if these “features” are not worth anything and others saying this is an example of how GPU manufacturers don’t understand what their customers want.

“The Lite Hash Rate Limiter is Pointless, Cryptocurrency Miners Say. NVIDIA’s new feature has been met with scorn from the mining community.”

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As part of an effort to bring more GPUs into the hands of gamers, NVIDIA revealed in May 2021 that it will halve the Ethereum hash rate of freshly produced GeForce RTX 3080, RTX 3070, and RTX 3060 Ti graphics cards with a mining limitation.

According to the opinions of bitcoin miners gathered by PCMag, including those of Teeter, who runs a setup with roughly 95 GPUs, some of which are NVIDIA’s LHR models. While NVIDIA’s mining limitation works as claimed, some users, such as Tweeter, believe that the green team should not have bothered since the GPUs are still powerful enough to generate decent earnings and remain appealing to the bulk of miners.

“Yes, I believe LHR was unnecessary,” said Teeter, whose mining machine generates around $4,500 in Ethereum per month (after power expenses) even with NVIDIA’s GeForce RTX GPUs that are handicapped. He said that mining “isn’t a deal breaker for miners.”

Other explanations for the failure of NVIDIA’s Lite Hash Rate Limiter include:

There are software packages that can increase the Ethereum mining capacity of NVIDIA LHR models by more than 70%.
Due to GPU shortages, miners will grab anything is available, even models that have been hampered.
The LHR cards from NVIDIA only have a lower hash rate for Ethereum, therefore the limitation is irrelevant to the numerous miners that operate with other cryptocurrencies.

Others have pointed out that since it’s so simple to earn a reasonable profit, the use of desktop graphics cards for mining will only grow.

“We’ve heard a lot of anecdotes from customers in developing countries who are able to feed a family with only one GPU,” said Marko Tarman, a mining hardware expert with NiceHash. “Why not, since you can practically generate money with little effort?”

PCMag is the source of this information.