In its official blog, the company reported that for the GeForce RTX 3060 model, it had developed a separate video driver with a built-in algorithm for tracking mining attempts using a GPU. If it detects that the video card is used for something other than its intended purpose, that is, for games and work in ordinary applications, the video card driver will automatically reduce the hash rate of mining cryptocurrency by about half, making it unprofitable for mining.

NVIDIA indicates that GeForce RTX GPUs are packed with advanced ray tracing technology, AI scaling (DLSS) support, Reflex input lag reduction technology, and many other technologies to meet the needs of casual gamers and digital content creators.

Unfortunately, the company does not indicate in the blog whether it plans to introduce similar restrictions on cryptocurrency mining at the driver level for other models of the Ampere series video cards. But these measures are unlikely to help much because miners can use older versions of drivers.

Meanwhile, a minor review of the ZOTAC GAMING GeForce RTX 3060 Twin Edge video card appeared on YouTube, made by Levan Beruchashvili, a crypto blogger from Georgia, who managed to get this video card before the official announcement. And as the benchmark results show, its Ethereum mining performance is indeed reduced by 50% relative to the expected value. While the GeForce RTX 3060 Ti, when mining Ethereum, produces a performance of around 58 Mhesh / s, the new GeForce RTX 3060 drops the speed by half immediately after starting the mining process – its performance turns out to be about 25-26 Mhesh / s. And this could make such a card really unprofitable in mining, if not for one “but.” As Levan claims in the video, the performance limitation only works for one mining algorithm – Ethash. This means that any alternative cryptocurrencies that use different algorithms on the GeForce RTX 3060 will be mined at a normal rate.