Nvidia confirmed to us that while they may be limiting the cryptocurrency mining performance of the new RTX 3060, they are "not limiting the performance of GPUs already on the market." So if you're the proud owner of an Internet cafe in Vietnam and you've just invested in a bunch of Nvidia RTX 3080 cards, don't despair. You can update your drivers and earn tons of cash from mining.

The Green Team has announced that the new release of drivers for the RTX 3060 will limit the hash rate of new mainstream Ampere cards if it detects certain attributes of the Etherium cryptocurrency mining algorithm. This rate limitation will halve the mining performance of the new mainstream Ampere GPUs.

This approach is designed to make the most affordable RTX 30 series GPUs less desirable for miners so far, and means that all new cards will be employed in gaming PCs rather than power-hungry mining rigs. Nvidia says this is "an important step in ensuring that GeForce GPUs are in the hands of gamers."

We had assumed that the unhackable software limitations preventing the RTX 3060 from being an efficient mining GPU would force the same performance degradation on other Ampere-based cards running the same new driver release, but Nvidia has confirmed to us that this is not the case at all.

On second thought, that's entirely fair. As Jacob pointed out to me earlier, what GPU mining is doing to the latest graphics card inventory may not be desirable, but it is not illegal. So for Nvidia to arbitrarily reduce the performance of what people might have purchased purely for mining after the fact is a really bad practice. And in some alternate universe, there could have been legal consequences as well.

In other words, anything above the Nvidia RTX 3060 Ti is still fair game for GPU mining. However, the Green Team is working to steer cryptocurrency enthusiasts away from GeForce cards by setting up an entirely new silicon stream, a cryptocurrency mining processor, or Nvidia CMP. 11]

These are non-gaming cards, have no video output, are set at lower frequencies and voltages for mining efficiency, and "do not meet the specifications required for GeForce GPUs, and thus do not affect the availability of GeForce GPUs to gamers."

The Nvidia CMPs are not designed to be used with GeForce GPUs, but rather to be used with GeForce GPUs.

Nvidia has not commented further on the composition of the new silicon, so we still do not know what is on these CMP cards, but the four CMP chips announced today may consist of both Turing GPUs and Ampere GPUs It is beginning to appear that the four CMP chips may consist of both Turing and Ampere GPUs. The top 90HX appears to be an RTX 3080, while the other cards are most likely older Turing chips.

If Nvidia is using the previous generation of 12nm GPUs for their lower order CMP cards, this may help explain why this new generation of Nvidia products will have no impact on GeForce card production for us GPU hungry PC gamers.