NVIDIA has admitted to ‘accidentally removing the Hash limiter from the RTX 3060 graphic card in the 470.05 drivers was a mistake that has now been corrected. NVIDIA released a driver update a couple of days ago which unlocked the cryptocurrency mining potential on the Nvidia GeForce RTX 3060.
But NVIDIA has now come forward and explained that the driver’s release was an accident and that it wasn’t intentional. The 470.05 NVIDIA driver update allowed the RTX 3060 graphics card to mine Ethereum at its full potential, with a hash rate of almost 50 MH/s. NVIDIA released the following statement regarding the mishap.
A developer driver inadvertently included code used for internal development which removes the hash rate limiter on GeForce RTX 3060 in some configurations.
The driver has been removed.
NVIDIA has removed the GeForce 470.05 Dev driver. But copies of the same driver are now available all over the internet. Anyone who wants to mine using their RTX 3060 can now do so, as the driver was once uploaded to the internet, and once it’s there, it can never be removed. Nvidia has accidentally created the solution to the hash rate limiters just by releasing a driver and quickly taking it down.
There is some good news, however, as the driver allowed only for a single RTX 3060 to mine Ethereum at full capacity which is roughly 50 MH/s. This driver may be the solution for consumers because it doesn’t enable large-scale mining operations, rather allows consumers to mine on the side.
When NVIDIA introduced the hash limiter, they said that it is a hardware system that cannot be bypassed. The GeForce RTX 3060 was the first in the lineup to receive such treatment and the company stated that it will be hard to crack or even bypass based on how each aspect of the GPU was communicating with each other.
NVIDIA said the following about the Mining Hash Limiter.
The whole process occurs through a secure handshake between the GPU, Driver, and the BIOS (Firmware). All three prevent the removal of the hash limiter. Now NVIDIA is quite confident that this would be enough to tackle miners running GeForce GPUs but at the same time, we can’t be too sure about the overall effectiveness of this as VBIOS and driver mods could potentially allow miners to bypass the limit once again.
Previously, we already saw that the bypass actually does not really require any sort of driver or BIOS update. We will have to wait and see how this scenario progresses.
