[Corazoor]

I find the argument for this move unconvincing: Nvidias failure to meet demand is somehow the fault of... the customers? But since there are morally aprehensible workloads, it is totally fine to... throttle them? Not prevent or contractually prohibit, as one might expect... And of course it is Nvidia who decicdes on the morals of your workload.

I mean, seriously, how can anyone be ok with that?

[lacker]

how can anyone be ok with that?

I don't want to mine cryptocurrency on my graphics card. So given the choice of buying an unrestricted one off ebay for $2500, or a restricted one for the originally suggested price of $800, I would rather buy the restricted one. Nvidia isn't being dishonest, they aren't throttling the cards they already sold, they aren't claiming anything is moral or immoral, they are just offering a new product that does exactly what I want for cheaper. So I'm certainly okay with it.

[poglet]

I would like that too but it doesn't seem to be the case with the 'restricted' RTX 3060 (I would like to get it at RRP).

[jcheng]

I didn't see Nvidia weigh in on the morality of any workload, just like nerfing FP64 performance in their GeForce cards wasn't a statement on the morality of double-precision workloads. They're trying to steer cards towards a particular segment of the market, there can be a lot of reasons for that.

For example, they might believe that while selling to gamers is less lucrative than selling to miners in the short term, the gaming market will always exist while the mining market dries up the moment GPU mining is no longer profitable; so maintaining a good relationship with the gaming community is important for their long term health. Or maybe they're just tired of gamers yelling at them.

[wpietri]

You realize you're making a moral argument against moral arguments, right?

If you'd like to know how people are ok with this, it's been explained plenty already, right here in this discussion.

[Frost1x]

I think it's just an argument against a unilateral decision by NVIDIA under the facade of morals. Businesses aren't people and don't have morals, everything they do is strategic and profit motivated, even if the people that compose them have morals.

My guess is that NVIDIA doesn't want one basket of demand dominating the majority of their demand while disenfranching all of their other demands in parallel computing (graphics, industrial/scientific, etc.). If they allow crypto to take the lionshare of their cards, consumers for the other demands will eventually seek out alternatives if they haven't already. That's all well and fine as long as crypto demand sustains whatever NVIDIA can supply indefinitely.

It's not so great if crypto demand for GPUs drops drastically, then NVIDIA is sitting there looking to drum demand back up from all their previous customers and markets. Essentially, they're likely just trying to distribute risk for a future demand portfolio.

I can't honestly believe any large investors or top level executives at NVIDIA are losing a second of sleep by having so much demand they have to turn people away. If they're losing any sleep it's all the lost profit they can't make because they can't meet full demand or because they're in a potentially risky situation.

[wpietri]

Did they do it under a facade of morals? Perhaps you can point me to where Nvidia makes a moral argument.

As an aside, businesses don't act on their own. People do have morals, and they're the ones running things. Whether or not they use their morals is a different question, but we needn't preemptively excuse them from doing so just because money is involved.

[lamontcg]

This is how community standards works.

The government should never mandate that video card manufacturers do this, or don't do this.

If you don't like it, set up your own video card business that caters to crypto mining.

The vast majority of NVidia customers are applauding this move though.

This is the free market working, but if you're into crypto you may not like it because you're not winning the marketplace of ideas.

(And IMO if you support cryptocurrency you should appreciate this as well, because astronomically high GPU costs for gamers erodes the standing of cryptocurrencies in that demographic, it is very bad PR to just let GPU costs inflate -- people start to vehemently hate cryptocurrencies because of that effect).

[skjoldr]

They can't improve the supply any longer, so they are cutting demand instead.

Why would you prevent mining if some gamers do want to utilize their idle GPU power? Mining is supposed to be for everyone.