Nvidia no longer blocks Ethereum (ETH) mining on its graphics card, about a 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) It was released alongside the RTX 3060 as a way to dissuade cryptocurrency miners from buying up all available stock of the graphics card at launch. It would also be released for other GeForce GPUs manufactured after this time. LHR was pitched as a supposedly untouchable implementation in both hardware and software, which would detect an Ethereum mining workload and slow down the graphics card to decrease its profitability. However, after a shaky start, LHR would eventually become mostly, if not entirely, bypassed.
Some miners have even called LHR “nonsense.” (opens in new tab)
After Ethereum switched from a proof-of-work algorithm, which required GPU mining to validate the blockchain, to a proof-of-stake algorithm, which uses validator consensus, LHR became even more useless. The merge, as the change is known, took place on September 15, 2022, and reportedly no other cryptocurrency is proving profitable enough (opens in new tab) for GPU miners to abandon ship.
Ethereum mining is dead and Nvidia's LHR no longer serves any purpose.
This may be why, according to recent reports from Reddit (opens in new tab)via Twitter leaker I_Leak_VM (opens in new tab) and Video card (opens in new tab), Nvidia has completely removed the LHR limiter from its cards. Many people are responding to social threads confirming an increase in hash rate on LHR GPUs with the new drivers, even non-LHR hash rate, and we have also tested the new drivers on our test bench.
We used to nanomineiro (opens in new tab), with an RTX 3080 Ti, mining Ethereum Classic (ETC). This cryptocurrency is a continuation of an older version of Ethereum from 2016. It uses a nearly identical proof-of-work algorithm to Ethereum's ETHash and was similarly affected by the LHR limiter. In our test, the RTX 3080 Ti's hash rate increased from 75MH/s to over 103MH/s between the old 516.41 driver and the new 522.25 driver.
For the record, not even the highest hash rate is close to being profitable at the moment, especially with rising energy costs today.
I’m seeing some comments suggesting that Nvidia removed the LHR limiter to sell off old stock of RTX 30 series cards to miners, but that makes little to no sense. It’s been increasingly difficult to profit from cryptocurrency mining for much of the year, even before the merger, due to a broader drop in cryptocurrency value. As a result, graphics cards were already in less demand – there are simply fewer miners left to attract.
Similarly, LHR was intended to prevent mining of Ethereum, which no longer exists, and while it did impact the hash rate for mining some similar coins, such as Ethereum Classic, other alternatives were mineable at a rapid pace. Miners were also bypassing LHR by mining Ethereum and another cryptocurrency at the same time, to squeeze the full mining power out of a card. And let’s not forget the miners who simply bypassed LHR, such as NiceHash (opens in new tab).
The removal of LHR will mean that Ethereum Classic will now be easy to mine. However, its hash rate has never reached anything close to that of Ethereum, nor has its value.
One ETH is worth US$1,328.40 at the time of writing. One ETC is worth US$1,328.40. And you would need about 600 MH/s at the same 300W level to get anywhere near the breakeven point at current energy prices.
Nvidia's LHR is pretty much useless today, and has been for a while now, so it's not surprising to see the company ditch this surplus code altogether.
And anyway, the removal of LHR from the latest Nvidia driver pack is a sideshow to the real improvement the driver pack offers to gamers: big performance boosts for some DX12 games. (opens in new tab).
