The first top-end Nvidia Ampere graphics card you can actually buy? GeForce RTX 3080 Ti received hardware and software protection from mining

The day before yesterday we wrote that Nvidia is going to transfer the budget GeForce RTX 3060 video card to the new GA106-302 GPU – it will implement hardware measures to limit mining, which, together with software, should make the video card completely unprofitable for use by cryptocurrency miners. And, according to the source, the same has already been done for the GeForce RTX 3080 Ti.

This model also uses a different GPU – GA102-202 / 302 instead of GA102-200. The mass production of this GPU has already begun, and the appearance of the serial GeForce RTX 3080 Ti on the market is only a matter of time. Based on the engineering samples of this model, it became clear that there is protection against mining and it really works: you can use CUDA cores in game processes, but not when mining cryptocurrencies (specifically, Ethereum).

Interestingly, the new and old versions of GeForce RTX 3080 Ti have the same device identifier, which allows you to install the BIOS version without protection against mining, but in this case the video card simply will not boot: PCI device identifiers are different, and it is simply impossible to rewrite them. (they are set at both software and hardware levels). As for the software level, a more comprehensive protection against mining has already been implemented in the beta version of the driver for the GeForce RTX 3080 Ti.

In general, if this time Nvidia really succeeds in making the video card unusable in mining processes, then the GeForce RTX 3080 Ti may become the first top-end Ampere model that can actually be bought. Considering that for the GeForce RTX 3070 they are now asking about $ 1,300 (or even more), the GeForce RTX 3080 Ti offered for the same money will turn out to be a much more profitable purchase for games.

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