Nvidia no longer blocks Ethereum (ETH) mining on its graphics cards.

Nvidia's Lite Hash Rate (LHR) cryptocurrency limiter (opens in new tab) was released with the RTX 3060 and was used as a way to stop cryptocurrency miners from buying up all available graphics card inventory at launch. It was also rolled out to other GeForce GPUs manufactured since then.LHR was released as an untouchable implementation across hardware and software that would detect ethereum mining workloads and slow down graphics cards to reduce profitability. After a rocky start, however, LHR eventually became largely, if not entirely, avoidable. [Some minorities even called LHR "pointless." (opens in new tab)

as Ethereum moved from a proof-of-work algorithm that required GPU mining to validate the blockchain to a proof-of-stake algorithm that instead used verifier consensus, LHR has become even more meaningless; it has been reported that other cryptocurrencies have not been profitable enough (open in new tab) for GPU miners.

Ethereum mining is dead and Nvidia's LHR no longer serves any purpose.

This may be why Nvidia has removed the LHR limiter from their cards altogether, according to recent reports from Reddit (open in new tab), Twitter leaker I_Leak_VM (open in new tab), and Videocardz (open in new tab) This may be the reason why Nvidia removed the LHR limiter from their cards altogether. Many people have replied to the social threads, confirming that the new driver has increased the hash rate of LHR GPUs to the non-LHR hash rate.

We mined Ethereum Classic (ETC) using a nanominer (opens in new tab) with an RTX 3080 Ti. This cryptocurrency is a successor to an older version of Ethereum issued in 2016. It uses nearly the same proof-of-work algorithm as Ethereum's ETHash and is similarly affected by the LHR limiter. In our tests, the RTX 3080 Ti hash rate increased from 75 MH/s to over 103 MH/s between the old 516.41 driver and the new 522.25 driver.

Incidentally, even higher hash rates are not enough to make it profitable right now, especially considering today's rising energy costs.

I have seen some comments that Nvidia has removed the LHR limiter to sell off its old inventory of RTX 30 series cards to the miners, but that makes little sense. For most of this year, it was increasingly difficult to make a profit from cryptocurrency mining, even before Merge, due to the growing write-offs in cryptocurrency values. As a result, demand for graphics cards was already declining.

Similarly, the LHR prevented mining of Ethereum, which no longer exists, and affected hash rates for mining some similar coins, such as Ethereum Classic, while other alternative coins could be mined at full pace. Miners also avoided the LHR by mining Ethereum and another crypto at the same time, thus exploiting the full mining performance of the card. Furthermore, we should not forget miners like NiceHash (open in new tab), who bypassed the LHR altogether.

The elimination of the LHR means that Ethereum Classic will be easier to mine. However, its hash rate is not comparable to Ethereum, nor is it worth it.

As of this writing, 1 ETH is worth $1,328.40; 1 ETC is worth $24.34. And to break even at today's energy prices would require 600 MH/s at the same 300 W level.

Nvidia's LHR is practically useless today, and has been for some time now. As far as we know, there is no mention of the RTX 4090 (open in new tab) being an LHR graphics card.

And anyway, the removal of LHR from the latest Nvidia driver package is a sideshow to the real improvement that that driver package offers gamers, namely a significant performance boost in some DX12 games (open in new tab).