What you need to know
- NVIDIA has been trying to dissuade crypto miners from buying its consumer-facing GPUs via tactics such as hash rate limiters.
- Miners have kept bypassing these measures.
- This time around, miners have figured out that the trick to subverting NVIDIA's latest mining deterrent is to mine two cryptocurrencies at once.
NVIDIA has been working hard to prove that the best GPUs for crypto mining are in fact not the best GPUS for crypto mining at all and that consumer-facing graphics cards should be for average users and not those looking to make a crypto fortune. The company's stance comes at a time when analyst statistics estimate that roughly 25% of GPUs went to crypto miners and scalpers in the first quarter of 2021.
To combat miners, NVIDIA has instated hash rate limiters in many of its cards. You can learn what a hash rate is in our previous coverage on the topic, but here's the key takeaway: Hash rates are essential to crypto mining, and putting a limit on them minimizes a GPU's ability to effectively and efficiently dig for cryptocurrency.
So the question for miners has become: How to mine crypto when NVIDIA is deliberately trying to stymie said activity. And the latest answer to that ever-evolving question turns out to be rather counterintuitive.
As reported by Tom's Hardware, a software has seized upon a fresh solution to the hash rate limiter conundrum. In order to bypass NVIDIA's forbidden activities list, it simply does more of the forbidden activity. That's right: The software (named T-Rex) means that if you mine two cryptocurrencies instead of just one, you can bypass limiters. The tradeoff is that you still can't focus 100% of a card's energies on one currency, but at least you can maximize the card's overall output.
