Confused on Steam Play and Proton? Be sure to check out our guide.
We do often include affiliate links to earn us some pennies. See more here.

A few bits of NVIDIA news to cover today with some small and some big news including drivers, hardware and open source.

Firstly, on the driver front, NVIDIA recently released the Linux 465.31 driver as part of their "New Feature Branch". It's a small release adding in support for the GeForce RTX 3050 Ti Laptop GPU and the GeForce RTX 3050 Laptop GPU, plus a bug fix that "could cause AddressSanitizer to report a heap-buffer-overflow during initialization of the OpenGL and Vulkan libraries".

Onto something bigger: NVIDIA are trying to get "GeForce Cards into the Hands of Gamers". How? Well, they announced a reduced hash rate for newly manufactured GeForce RTX 3080, 3070 and 3060 Ti graphics cards to make them "less desirable to miners". This is somewhat similar to what they did when they announced the RTX 3060. These new cards will start shipping in May, with the reduced ETH hash rate and they will be clearly labelled as either "Lite Hash Rate" or "LHR" and listed on the boxes and will not apply to cards already purchased.

What do you think to this move to reduce Ethereum mining on GeForce cards? Let us know in the comments!

In a bit of open source news, NVIDIA recently upgraded their NVIDIA DesignWorks Samples to do some cleaning up work, along with a relicensing from BSD-3 to Apache 2.0. These samples include work developers can use for Ray Tracing with Vulkan, OpenGL shader-based occlusion culling, order-independent transparency in Vulkan and lots more.

Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.
14 Likes
About the author -
author picture
I am the owner of GamingOnLinux. After discovering Linux back in the days of Mandrake in 2003, I constantly came back to check on the progress of Linux until Ubuntu appeared on the scene and it helped me to really love it. You can reach me easily by emailing GamingOnLinux directly.
See more from me
The comments on this article are closed.
15 comments
Page: «2/2
  Go to:

minfaer May 19, 2021
Quoting: kokoko3k
Quoting: ShabbyXWhy not just ... manufacture more cards?!
Or maybe, why not producing cards just for mining at a reduced price?

Because it changes nothing. Imagine you are a miner, and Nvidia produces 100 of those cards, in addition to 100 gaming cards, which are 70% less profitable for miners. Would you

A) Buy the 100 mining cards and take profits from them
or B) Buy 100 mining cards AND 100 gaming cards and and have 130% the profit of A)?

There is no ceiling on mining demand. Only when mining on gaming cards becomes unprofitable will that demand disappear. But as already mentioned, NVidia does this only to prevent competing with used cards in the future, not to have more cards available for gamers.


Last edited by minfaer on 19 May 2021 at 5:45 pm UTC
Mountain Man May 20, 2021
Trying to stop crypto miners is akin to stopping pirates. Nvidia might be able to put some speed bumps in the way, but the miners will find a way around them pretty quickly.


Last edited by Mountain Man on 20 May 2021 at 1:15 am UTC
Comandante Ñoñardo May 20, 2021
I insist!
Graphic cards must be upgradeable by design...specially those cards for gaming.
NVIDIA (and AMD) GPUs must use a socket, like the Intel and AMD CPUs.
And memory chips should not be soldered on the graphic board. VRAM should be in GBDIMM modules, (compact like a SODIMM one)
Each GBDIMM module must have two 64 bit channels.

This will be more friendly for to the environment.
Kravensky Jun 3, 2021
If ETH is such a problem, probably a better way to fix it is to help Ethereum 2.0 (which is open source) to be released. It should implement Proof-of-Stake algorythm, which'll make ETH mining obsolete.

But there are still many Proof-of-Work cryptocurrencies to mine, so i doubt it'll help much. Cloud gaming is better alternative, probably. I better pay NVIDIA for yearly GFN subscription than buy a new GPU at current prices.


Last edited by Kravensky on 3 June 2021 at 12:01 pm UTC
MayeulC Jun 4, 2021
Quoting: KravenskyIf ETH is such a problem, probably a better way to fix it is to help Ethereum 2.0 (which is open source) to be released. It should implement Proof-of-Stake algorythm, which'll make ETH mining obsolete.

You wish. As you said, PoW is here to stay until the ponzi schemes start to collapse, at least. ETH will just fork with the miners on one side and the stakers on the other (most will probably do both). But if I had to choose, I'd prefer seeing cryptocurrencies use PoS.
While you're here, please consider supporting GamingOnLinux on:

Reward Tiers: Patreon. Plain Donations: PayPal.

This ensures all of our main content remains totally free for everyone! Patreon supporters can also remove all adverts and sponsors! Supporting us helps bring good, fresh content. Without your continued support, we simply could not continue!

You can find even more ways to support us on this dedicated page any time. If you already are, thank you!
The comments on this article are closed.