NVIDIA Releases GeForce Driver 466.27 With New Anti-Ethereum Limiter

NVIDIA released its latest GeForce driver version 466.27 just yesterday. The driver ahead of next week’s launch of Metro Exodus Enhanced Edition, but more importantly, it marks the brand’s second attempt at implementing its anti-Ethereum limiter for the GeForce RTX 3060.

As a quick recap, NVIDIA announced that the RTX 3060 family of graphics cards would feature a limiter that would dampen the card’s mining performance for the cryptocurrency. By doing this, it hoped that it would deter cryptominers from buying the card in bulk and leaving bonafide gamers empty-handed, as a result.

Unfortunately for NVIDIA, the GPU maker made a boo-boo less than a month after the RTX 3060 was launched, when it released a GeForce driver without the anti-Ethereum code, thus allowing miners to mine the cryptocurrency with total abandon. Among other creative methods, that is.

With the new driver version, NVIDIA is breathing new life into its anti-Ethereum miner code and based on its rather ambiguous blog post, it sounds as though driver version 466.27 is expected to be the minimum driver version for all GeForce RTX 30 series cards that ship out from mid-May onwards.

As to whether or not the new driver update will actually turn miners away from NVIDIA’s GeForce RTX 30 series cards and, alternatively, turn them towards the brand’s CMP lineup, only time will tell.

GPU Miners Bypass NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3060 Hashrate Limiter With Cheap HDMI Dummy Plug

Back in February, NVIDIA made two announcements in relation to the renewed cryptomining craze. The first was the launch of its Cryptocurrency Mining Processor (CMP) GPU, made specifically for cryptomining. The second was that it was limiting the hashrate of Ethereum mining for the RTX 3060, a pledge that has already been thwarted by GPU miners.

Unfortunately for NVIDIA, its anti-mining algorithm for the RTX 3060 are still actively being rubbished by GPU miners, with their most workaround the GPU brand’s Ethereum mining limiter being an HDMI dummy plug that can easily be procured from online stores.

For the uninitiated, NVIDIA’s anti-mining algorithm is designed to nerf the hashrate for Ethereum mining for all RTX 3060 cards. However, and for reasons still unknown, the company later released a GeForce beta driver that disabled the limiter within the algorithm, albeit still with some restrictions in place, in the form of parameters.

First, the motherboard that holds the RTX 3060 must have a PCIe 3.0 x8 interface as a minimum, which is pretty much any motherboard within the last six to seven years. The second parameter requires a monitor to be connected RTX 3060 via the onboard HDMI or DisplayPort output.

Bypassing the first parameter is clearly simple enough, and as we mentioned earlier, it didn’t take long for the GPU miners to realise that, while the driver is able to detect when a monitor is connected via the ports, it is unable to differentiate the difference between a real monitor or the dummy plug. To add insult to injury, the plugs themselves are cheap and go for around US$6 (~RM24) per unit.

As shown by one user from Quasar Zone, the workaround enabled him to run a four-card RTX 3060 setup, with each card able to mine Ethereum at an average of 48MH/s, bringing the total hashrate to 192MH/s. In terms of profitability, that’s a monthly average of US$562 (~RM2318).