Nvidia Aims to Get Its GPUs Back 'Into the Hands of Gamers' by Reducing Mining Capabilities on 3 Graphic Cards

A major chipmaker keeps making efforts to calm down the gaming community’s anger toward cryptocurrency miners who are taking the lead in buying graphic cards massively, boosting its prices. Nvidia has announced that it will deliberately limit the capabilities for some of its newly graphic cards to keep a balanced inventory for gamers.

Cards With Limited Hashrate Will Be the Ones Shipped Starting May

According to the announcement published by the chipmaking giant, the measure will reduce the ethereum (ETH) hashrate to Geforce RTX 3080, RTX 3070, and RTX 3060 Ti graphics cards. The decision follows a similar maneuver done in February with all Geforce RTX 3060 cards.

Nvidia pointed out that the new graphic cards will be shipped in late May, although a specific date was not provided as of press time.

However, the chipmaker clarified that reduced hashrate only applies to manufactured cards with the “LHR” (Lite Hash Rate) identifier and not with graphic cards already purchased.

On the statement, the company said:

We believe this additional step will get more Geforce cards at better prices into the hands of gamers everywhere.

Cryptocurrency miners, specifically ETH ones, need fast graphic processing units (GPUs) to solve algorithmic puzzles – something that graphic cards like Nvidia provide could make smoothly. On the other hand, bitcoin (BTC) miners need the technology supplied by application-specific integrated circuits (ASICs).

Dealing With Expensive Prices of the GPUs

Such a fact has made graphic cards manufactured by companies like Nvidia see significant demand and become more expensive in the market. Now, an RTX 3080 card is being sold at a ticket price of $3,600 – an astonishing figure compared with its regular price of $880 when virtual currency mining was not a trending topic.

Other GPU-related manufacturers had to take measures to deal with the high prices of graphic cards and offer accessible prices to gamers. In March, AMD was looking to introduce a GPU for mining ETH.

The AMD Navi 12, a GPU first introduced exclusively for Apple Macbook Pro devices, could be the first crypto mining-related specific processor launched by the company.