In a lip-service attempt at limiting the effect of cryptocurrency miners buying up all its gaming graphics cards, Nvidia will be limiting the mining efficiency of its upcoming RTX 3080 Ti GPU. This hash limiter will effectively halve the card's ability to mine Ether, making it less of a profitable purchase. At least in theory. The sheer power of the card will likely still make it profitable, however, so what effect it will have, remains to be seen.
The RTX 3080 Ti is a long-rumored RTX 3000 series GPU that has reportedly gone through many design refreshes. It was originally slated to be a 20GB card, but that's now been adjusted down to just 12GB. A lot of tweaks took place because Nvidia was surprised by the capabilities of the AMD RX 6900 XT, so we would expect pricing and performance to match or exceed that GPU — at least while it stays in stock.
It will have 12G 19Gbps VRAM and an ETH mining nerf too.
— kopite7kimi (@kopite7kimi) March 4, 2021
The latest rumors from Twitter user Kopite7kimi suggest that the mining limiter will be a firm addition to this card, as it was with the RTX 3060. It also confirms the plans for over 10,000 CUDA cores, which should make this card almost as capable as an RTX 3090, but at a much reduced price.
The question now remains, will there be enough stock to cover the gamer demand? It seems unlikely, but we'll have to see when the card launches at the end of April.
