Nvidia GeForce RTX 3080 Ti: Unlock Mining Hashrate Driver for Windows

https://developer.nvidia.com/cuda/wsl/download

Nvidia GeForce RTX Mining Hashrate Driver

Nvidia GeForce RTX 3080 Ti comes with a reduced hash rate for mining

Like the recently released Nvidia GeForce RTX 3060, which came with a mining hashrate limit imposed by Nvidia, the new GeForce RTX 3080 Ti also came “with a reduced Ethereum hashrate,” making it less attractive to miners. The just-released Nvidia GeForce RTX 3080 Ti is nearly equivalent in specifications to the RTX 3090 GPU, but has half as much video memory, meaning only 12GB of GDDR6X instead of the full 24GB. For the new RTX 3080 Ti there is a very slight decrease in terms of CUDA cores as well as memory clock speeds, but the memory bus remains 384-bit, so in theory it should be very similar in performance to the RTX 3090, and this applies not only to mining, but also to gaming. However, there is an Ethereum hash rate limiter that messes things up a bit for miners, but not for gamers, and the halved video memory should make it more affordable for gamers compared to the RTX 3080… in theory.

Nvidia is now talking about limiting the hash rate of Ethereum mining, although some other memory-intensive cryptocurrency mining algorithms may also be affected, as we already know, but there are other algorithms that will provide full hash rates without any artificial limitation. Here is an example of RavenCoin (RVN) mining on an RTX 3080 Ti where hashrate is not artificially reduced, you will get about 48 MH/s hashrate for KawPoW with stock settings. And while this would make RVN mining more profitable than ETH on this particular GPU, if the artificial ETH hashrate limiter wasn’t present, ETH mining would be more profitable. So, the new Nvidia GeForce RTX 3080 Ti would not be an attractive option for Ethereum miners, although some other non-ETH related cryptocurrencies may be interested, but we see starting prices for the Ti as well as the Ti-free version where possible. And unlike miners, gamers won’t be very happy to buy at such inflated prices, but don’t forget that gamers will get performance close to that of the much more expensive (at the moment) RTX 3090 GPUs.

Trying Ethereum (ETH) mining at stock RTX 3080 Ti settings shows an initial hashrate of around 100 MH/s, which quickly drops to 53-55 MH/s at default settings due to Nvidia’s enforced hashrate limit for ETH mining. The default settings for the RTX 3080 Ti from Palit/Gainward that we tried give us 325W of power consumption, according to Miner. And while Nvidia says to limit hash rate for Ethereum mining, other similar memory-intensive mining algorithms could also be affected, as we’ve seen with the RTX 3060 GPUs, which were the first to introduce Nvidia’s hash rate limitation solution.

The new Nvidia GeForce RTX 3070 Ti, due to hit the market in a few days, will also offer a nice hardware upgrade over the older RTX 3070 GPU, but like the RTX 3080 Ti, it will come with an artificial Ethereum hash rate limiter. The most noticeable upgrade of the new RTX3 070 Ti compared to the old model without Ti is the new faster GDDR6X memory, which theoretically should increase mining performance for memory intensive algorithms, but because of Nvidia’s hashrate limiter, Ethereum mining will not benefit much and in fact we expect to see lower hash rates than on RTX 3070 due to the limiter in place. Again, some other memory intensive algorithms other than Ethash may also suffer, though not all, and GPU intensive mining will probably not suffer, and the performance there should be slightly higher than on the RTX 3070.

The new beta driver for the Nvidia RTX 3080 opens access to Ethereum mining.

Last month, Nvidia implemented a special system to reduce the hash rate of Ethereum mining on its new RTX graphics card. The mining performance was supposed to be limited by about 50 percent, but now many reports claim that cryptomainers have bypassed the protection.

Japanese website PC Watch first showed that Nvidia’s protection could be bypassed without having to modify the driver or BIOS. ComputerBase has since confirmed PC Watch’s report and reported that the latest Nvidia 470.05 beta driver automatically improves performance for most RTX 3060 owners. Andreas Schilling, editor of Hardwareluxx, has also confirmed these findings. “Various RTX 3060 cards seem to work with this beta driver.”

A workaround to the forced hash rate limiter for Nvidia GeForce RTX mining Ethereum, and apparently it’s pretty simple. You just need to use developer driver version 470.05, where apparently no hashrate limiter applies, unlike the regular GeForce video driver you normally load for these graphics cards. This has been reported by some users and we can confirm that it does work and you can get full hashrate mining for Ethereum with this driver, however there is still a catch … read below with the latest updates on what and how it works .

The beta driver appears to unlock Ethereum mining performance on various RTX cards, which was probably not what Nvidia had planned for its test drivers. The 470.05 driver is designed for developers to test the performance of the Windows for Linux (WSL) subsystem and new features such as OpenCL 3.0 support

Nvidia originally limited RTX mining performance in an attempt to keep miners from buying the cards. Instead, Nvidia is offering a new cryptocurrency mining processor (CMP) for Ethereum miners. Bypassing the Ethereum mining performance beta driver will certainly make the cards more attractive to cryptomainers.

Nvidia seems confident in its software limitations reducing RTX mining performance. “It’s not just the drivers,” Brian Del Rizzo, Nvidia’s head of communications, said last month. “There is a safe handshake between the driver, the RTX chip and the BIOS (firmware) that prevents the hashing rate limiter from being removed.”<

To download the Nvidia developer driver version 470.05 (free registration required)…