Recently we saw NVIDIA take a big step against miners using their gaming-focused graphics cards for mining purposes when it announced hash rate limiters in all of its future cards starting from the RTX 3060. But AMD has made it clear that it will not be taking any kind of such step to restrict any workloads on its GPUs including cryptocurrency mining.
In a recent interview with PCGamer, Nish Neelalojanan, a product manager at AMD described why the RDNA 2 based cards are not suited for mining purposes.
That said, there are a couple of things. First of all, RDNA was designed from the ground up for gaming and RDNA 2 doubles up on this. And what I mean by this is, Infinity Cache and a smaller bus width were carefully chosen to hit a very specific gaming hit rate. However, mining specifically enjoys, or scales with, higher bandwidth and bus width so there are going to be limitations from an architectural level for mining itself.
AMD’s flagship RDNA 2 card, the RX 6900 XT based on the Navi 21 GPU, and only achieves 58-64 MH/s in mining. On the other hand, NVIDIA’s RTX 3000 flagship, the RTX 3090 can mine up at a speed of 120 MH/s. The 3090 takes advantage of having more memory, a wider bus, and higher bandwidth than its AMD counterpart.
Nish Neelalojanan has made it clear that AMD’s main focus of the RDNA 2 GPUs is gaming and the design choices of the RDNA 2 series definitely reflect that as well as the marketing of the card.
All our optimization, as always, is going to be gaming first, and we’ve optimized everything for gaming. Clearly, gamers are going to reap a ton of benefit from this, and it’s not going to be ideal for mining workload. That all said, in this market, it’s always a fun thing to watch.
What are your thoughts on AMD’s response to its GPUs being used in cryptocurrency mining? Let us know in the comments section below.
