NVIDIA Removes Hashrate Limiter for RTX 30-series LHR GPUs in the Latest Driver

In a last-ditch effort to clear inventory of its GeForce RTX 30-series “Ampere” graphics cards, NVIDIA has reportedly removed the hashrate limiter in the latest GeForce 522.25 drivers, without mentioning it anywhere in the driver’s release notes. A Redditor and GeForce RTX 3080 Ti owner by the username “Timbers007” rested that their card, which launched exclusively as LHR-enabled graphics cards (with no RTX 3080 Ti cards without LHR in circulation); is now achieving double its usual hashrates when benchmarked with ethminer. It’s able to put out 112 MH/s, a hashrate only possible with mining software that circumvents the LHR limiter, such as NiceHash or NBMiner.

In the thick of the graphics card shortage in 2020-21, as crypto currency miners were buying up inventory of gaming graphics cards through sophisticated retail bots; NVIDIA attempted to sour the milk for miners by introducing LHR (lite hashrate), a supposedly hardware-level limitation that cripples the mining performance of the GPU. This failed to improve things as NVIDIA accidentally released drivers without the hashrate limiter early on and redacted them, but not before they spread among miners. It was only a titanic crash in crypto-currency values, and the recent Ethereum merge that killed GPU-accelerated mining, which arrested demand, bringing RTX 30-series GPUs to prices more acceptable to gamers, as miners began flooding the market with their used GPUs at much lower prices. Will this improve sales of the RTX 30-series? Unlikely. Miners with RTX 30-series LHR graphics cards who already had the hacks to circumvent the limiter, are dumping their cards.