Earlier this year, NVidia designed their latest RTX 3060 card to limit the efficiency with which it can mine Ethereum blocks by 50%. Miners quickly surpassed the restriction, and now NVidia is rumored to be implementing mining limiters in the entire GTX 30-series product line. The restriction was supposedly intended to save some video cards for gamers, considering that miners have been purchasing so many cards that they contributed to a severe video card shortage.
This has been a major inconvenience to people trying to construct or upgrade gaming PCs. In addition to mining restrictions on gaming cards, NVidia created mining cards specifically for miners. The mining cards use GPUs that are not suitable for gamers, according to the company.
The inconvenience of being unable to find a good video card during a cryptocurrency bull season is a notable concern. However, there was a good side to it — the mass influx of low-priced used (unfortunately, thoroughly used) video cards onto the market during cryptocurrency bear markets provided the opportunity to get video cards. This is caused by miners selling off the video cards from their mining rigs after cryptocurrency prices fall.
If miners start exclusively using ‘mining cards’ and gamers start exclusively using ‘gaming cards’, then that will severely limit the selection of used video cards available to both gamers and miners. Gamers would no longer be able to take advantage of the used video cards sold by miners, increasing the likelihood that they’ll have to buy new video cards instead — that’s a very expensive consequence.
