Nvidia GeForce RTX 3060 to be relaunched with a hash rate limiter built into the GPU

Nvidia wants to take another crack at preventing crypto miners from gobbling up its gaming graphics cards by the boatload. Its previous effort was laughable, to say the least, considering that Nvidia's own beta drivers bypassed the ETH mining restriction. This time around, Nvidia has decided to go back to the drawing board and redesign the entire GeForce RTX 3060 GPU from scratch.

HKEPC (via Igor's Lab, Videocardz) reports that the GeForce RTX 3060's existing GA106-300 GPU will be discontinued altogether. It will be replaced by a new GA106-302 GPU, which will also render older drivers redundant. This new GeForce RTX 3060 variant is expected to hit the shelves by May 2021. Everything else should remain identical, for the most part. However, it'll be interesting to see how the two differently-specced RTX 3060 variants fare against each other.

We reported earlier that the entire Ampere lineup would be relaunched with an ETH hash-rate limiter built-in. Therefore, we can reasonably assume that GA104 and GA102-based GPUs will get the same treatment at some point. Even if the new chips work their magic and managed to cap ETH hash rates across the board, gamers will still have a hard time getting their hands on one. Nvidia has admitted that the GPU shortage is here to stay. Gamers may have to make do with Pascal-era cards such as the GTX 1050 Ti and GTX 1080 Ti till the Ampere stock improves.

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