Quote:Nvidia, the chip company known for its gaming-friendly graphical processing units (GPUs), said that its hotly anticipated GeForce RTX 3060 chipset, launching Thursday, has an added bonus of thwarting crypto-mining. Experts applaud the effort, but are skeptical the move will take the bullseye off the backs of gamers and their computer rigs.
 
“With the launch of GeForce RTX 3060 on Feb. 25, we’re taking an important step,” the company said in a statement. “RTX 3060 software drivers are designed to detect specific attributes of the Ethereum cryptocurrency mining algorithm, and limit the hash rate, or cryptocurrency mining efficiency, by around 50 percent.”
 
The company said the RTX 3060 is still built to support “real-time ray-tracing, DLSS AI-accelerated image upscaling technology, Reflex super-fast response rendering for the best system latency” and other advanced, high-end graphics perks.
 
So it’s not that performance has been lowered — rather, the drivers will simply perform some blocking-and-tackling in the form of throttling Ethereum-specific use. Ethereum (or Ether) is a cryptocurrency and platform – and represents the second-largest cryptocurrency by market capitalization, after Bitcoin.
 
“Simply put, Nvidia will try to detect the code you’re running, and purposefully…take out what amounts to denial-of-service (DoS) actions against software it thinks is trying to do Ethereum calculations on the GPU,” Paul Ducklin, researcher at Sophos security, explained in a blog posting.