- NVIDIA doesn't care about you.
They don't care about gamers,
and they don't care about the environment.
The truth of the matter
is that to basically any company
that's beholden to its shareholders,
you are nothing more than a living wallet on legs.
If you imagine it any other way,
then, congratulations,
you played yourself.
No.
While NVIDIA employs some very good people,
talented engineers,
passionate gamers,
the top priority for NVIDIA, the company,
is their stock price.
And the move they just made demonstrates this perfectly.
I'm talking, of course,
about the launch of their CMP,
or cryptocurrency mining processor,
a product NVIDIA claims
was inspired by their obsession with gaming.
Yeah, I don't think that's gonna be hard to debunk.
So let's get started.
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For the uninitiated, this isn't the first time
NVIDIA has created a product
specifically for cryptocurrency mining.
Remember the GGeForce that we gamed on
using a hacked driver back in 2019?
That was basically the same idea.
It was a GTX 1060,
but with a cheap cooler, no display outputs,
and a locked down driver that served only to ensure
that once its usefulness as a mining card
had run its course,
no gamer could ever enjoy it.
The difference is that last time the program
was run quietly through board partners.
And then just as quietly,
faded into the shadows when crypto crashed in 2018.
It was that crash, along with unexceptional performance,
that meant that miners didn't care about the RTX 20 series.
So we got an entire generation
of relatively same pricing and availability.
We thought the worst of it was over.
We were wrong.
Now GPU mining gets a full-fat product page on nvidia.com
and a blog post announcing new cards dedicated to it.
If you want a good laugh,
you can go ahead and read the blog post.
But, here's the highlights.
Starting with the upcoming RTX 3060,
GeForce cards will be locked
to deliver only half of their true hash rate
in cryptocurrency mining operations.
CMP cards, by contrast,
will be fully unlocked.
NVIDIA then goes on to talk about
what a win this is for gamers.
Because crypto miners will certainly find no way around the
"unhackable driver" that limits performance
on what will probably be
their best selling GPU of the generation.
But we've got a problem here.
That is aside from a software lock being unbeatable.
NVIDIA's claim that they care who buys their GPU's.
They are still GPU is by the way, they're not CMPs.
Are just words.
Let's look instead at NVIDIA's actions.
If they really didn't want miners buying these things,
like for realsies,
they would've just left it at driver block
and sold the chips exclusively to gamers
under the GeForce banner.
But no, within the perfect storm we find ourselves in,
what with the global chip shortage,
scalpers and bots with nothing better to do,
and, a mining boom, thanks to surging cryptocurrency prices,
what clearly happened
is NVIDIA spotted an opportunity for profit first,
and then came up with a story later
to make it look like they're doing something
to improve the situation for gamers.
Here's a couple of holes we can easily poke
in NVIDIA's story.
Number one, Silicon production is finite.
So every mining GPU they make
has the potential to be a gaming GPU that they didn't make.
Number two, these GPU's will have practically
zero value in the secondhand market,
depriving future gamers,
of what otherwise might be a great deal on eBay
a couple of years down the road.
This accelerates the rate at which these cards
will turn into worthless e-waste.
Let's go into these in more depth, then.
We're in the midst of a worldwide Silicon shortage
that is so severe,
that even car manufacturers are suffering.
Let that sink in for a second.
Car manufacturers are having trouble
keeping up with their production,
because they can't get chips.
And yet NVIDIA claims to be doing gamers a solid
by setting aside a stash specifically,
for a task that they'll become obsolete for
as soon as the next crypto slump.
We reached out to NVIDIA about this
and their response was that these new GPU's
will in no way impact GeForce production
because CMP GPU's are,
optimized for mining and
don't meet the GeForce specification anyway.
Well, that actually sounds okay in theory.
But how can we know that?
History has taught us time and time again,
that even products that were specifically created
to make some kind of use out of Silicon
that otherwise wouldn't have made the cut,
eventually, because of demand,
will get filled with otherwise fully functioning Silicon.
I mean, just look at AMD's triple core CPUs
from back in the Phenom days.
Within a matter of months,
practically all of them were unlockable with a BIOS hack
to quad core.
And heck, we even did a video
about an NVIDIA product that could be unlocked.
The MSI GeForce GTX 465 Twin Frozr II Golden Edition,
that's a mouthful,
could actually be turned into a GTX 470
with a simple BIOS mod.
The success rate, for those wondering,
I flashed over 100 of them personally, was about 75%.
Now the reason for this phenomenon
is that as manufacturing matures,
the number of defective samples actually drops.
And eventually, in order to keep making your value products,
you need to start artificially cutting down
your premium ones.
So for that reason,
even if we take NVIDIA's word for it,
100%, that no GeForce GPU's are going to go into CMP cards,
it's a foregone conclusion that good GPU's
will end up in these mining cards, eventually.
And that's not even considering the fact that
in simpler times these, semi defective GPU's
probably would have ended up in a cheaper
KO ski or something like that,
that would have benefited gamers,
rather than participating
in environmentally devastating levels of energy consumption
in the pursuit of free cash.
Bringing us to point number two.
These GPUs will never make it into gamers hands,
no matter what compromises gamers
would have been willing to accept.
I mean, it's pretty unrealistic to think
that another GP106-like driver hack
is going to delay their trip to the landfill.
And furthermore,
I think given the literal billions of dollars at play here,
it's far more likely
that a driver mod to bypass
the hashrate restrictions on GeForce products,
or some other kind of work from the crypto community
to make hashing on them harder to detect,
will happen,
and all CMP is gonna do is guarantee GPU supply for miners.
Which, at the end of the day is just fine by NVIDIA.
Because the fewer low cost alternatives exist for consumers,
the more likely it is
that people will go buy a shiny new GPU,
rather than look to Facebook Marketplace or to Craigslist.
'Cause don't kid yourself.
NVIDIA remembers what happened
with the RTX 20 series launch.
The recommendation from most reviewers,
including us, by the way,
was to ignore RTX 20 series,
and just go buy a used GTX 1080 or 1080Ti instead.
And there were plenty of used 10 series GPUs to be found
because of, that's right,
the crypto boom and bust that had just occurred.
"But Linus," you might say,
"No gamer wants a Crypto card anyway.
It's all worn out."
Well, that's where you're only sort of right.
I mean, yeah, some of them died of course.
But, many of the cards that were mined on for years,
still had plenty of life left in them
because most knowledgeable mining operators,
actually under volt the cards,
both to reduce their heat output,
and to reduce their power consumption.
So, NVIDIA is actually playing a pretty clever game here
covering their bottom line both today and tomorrow
by ensuring that when this mining boom ends,
which it inevitably will,
these cards don't end up flooding the secondhand market
and incentivizing people to buy used.
Which leads us to the subject
of the predictable final resting place for these cards.
The landfill.
With no way to recoup some of their costs
by selling their used cards,
the best possible outcome
is that crypto miners will send them
to an electronics recycler.
But here's a dirty little secret.
Very little actually gets recycled from a product like this.
I mean, even if you could economically pull
all the gold and other precious metals
from a fully manufactured product like this,
and by all accounts, you realistically can't,
you're still left with a pile of ceramics, PCBs,
and plastics, that aren't going anywhere anytime soon.
The problem of e-waste
and the wider environmental impact of the tech industry
has been growing for long enough
that we are now rightly scrutinizing companies
for things as small as single use plastics packaging.
But, before you get upset,
Steve and I love gaming just as much as you do.
We're not saying that you need to
feel bad for enjoying your life and
stop buying video cards altogether.
We're just saying that of the three Rs,
reduce and reuse come before recycle for a good reason.
And NVIDIA, is intentionally ignoring both of them.
These are single use GPUs, designed to be discarded.
This is 100% a move by NVIDIA to cover their own asses.
And there are zero (beep) given about gamers.
No matter how hard they scream that their focus is GeForce.
The GeForce-100 changed absolutely nothing
about the short supply last time.
And it won't change anything today.
NVIDIA is not your friend,
and you shouldn't defend this (beep.)
The good news though,
is that I'm gonna tell NVIDIA right here and now
how to fix this for gamers.
Let's see if they do it.
NVIDIA, you need to unlock the 3060 driver.
And, hold on.
I'm sure someone is gonna throw this up on
r/unpopularhottakes or whatever,
but gamers, think about the bigger picture
here for a second.
We just explained to you how realistically,
crypto miners gonna crypto mine.
It's not gonna have any impact
on pricing or availability today.
And at least it ensures that as crypto falls
and miners start losing money, and liquidating their assets,
patient gamers will repay veritable bounty
of cheap GPU Tendies.
So diamond hands, gamers.
Diamond hands.
Not that it matters anyway, because
the truth is NVIDIA is too greedy, arrogant, or both,
to actually do it.
That's probably a separate video.
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If you guys enjoyed this video,
maybe have a look at the one we did actually gaming
on that previous P106 mining card.
It demonstrates pretty well why we are so upset
about these arbitrary and artificial restrictions.
I shouldn't say arbitrary, it's not arbitrary.
It's got a clear intent.