Last month, Nvidia made a major effort to reduce the Ethereum on its new graphics card, the RTX 3060. The special system that was created was intended to make the RTX 3060 undesirable for cryptominers.
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However, as Nvidia has now stated, the company accidentally unlocked these restrictions with a new driver program.
“A developer driver accidentally included code used for internal development that removes the hash rate limitation on the RTX 3060 in certain configurations,” an Nvidia spokesperson told The Verge. “The driver has now been removed.”
Although Nvidia was relatively quick to remove the driver, the damage has already been done. The latest beta driver, Nvidia 470.05, automatically unlocks performance for most RTX 3060 cards, increasing hashrates for Ethereum mining.
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Copies of the driver can be easily found online, and Nvidia will not be able to prevent RTX 3060 owners from continuing to use this driver in the future.
Nvidia initially throttled the mining performance of the RTX 3060 in an attempt to drive cryptominers out of the market for these cards. The GPU maker seemed confident that its limitations could not be overcome, even claiming that it wasn't just the driver that was limiting performance.
See also: Will new AMD graphics cards be released?
"It's not just the driver," said Bryan Del Rizzo, Nvidia's head of communications, last month. "There's a secure partnership between the driver, the RTX 3060 silicon, and the BIOS (firmware) that prevents the removal of hash rate limits."
Nvidia clearly didn't expect to release a driver that would accidentally unlock the limitations it had placed on its graphics card.
