Nvidia introducing LHR is something we all fondly remember.
Imagine you sell illegal firearms to anyone that is willing to buy it at any given rate and when confronted about your antics, you act all high and mighty by selling lesser ammo with each and every firearm. If that analogy doesn’t make sense, let us explain.
During the Crypto boom, where every person who could get their hands on a GPU would slam it in a mining rig and start racking in mining rewards in the form of Ethereum, which at that time was over $3,000. While on the outside, Nvidia claimed that they are all out in the support of gamers who couldn’t get their hands on their newly released RTX 3000 series GPUs, but the dire truth was, Nvidia simply didn’t care.
Nvidia more than profited off the mining trend and recorded the highest revenue in their entire history. In essence, they did absolutely nothing to address the situation where miners would buy the entire stock in bulk and leave nothing to the gamers.
However, as a ploy to win back some public support, they introduced their Lite Hash Rate (LHR), which simply cut the hash rate in half. In layman terms, if you were earning $7 from your RTX 3070, now you would get $3.5, as your Hash Rate went from h/s 60 to h/s 30. While it did reduce the profit margin, it didn’t necessarily make mining obsolete and miners continued to purchase any card they could get their hands on. Furthermore, this primarily affected the profit on mining Ethereum, so miners naturally shifted to other Cryptocurrencies like Ravencoin.
Nonetheless, Nvidia has indeed removed the LHR limitation in their latest driver update and people who own the restricted cards are reporting drastically higher Hash Rates. However, it is important to note that this update came out a month after Ethereum became no longer mineable, which was the biggest source of income for miners.
Therefore, this move isn’t something that will drive up the demand nor will it affect the supply of the 3000 series cards as Nvidia has already reported they would run out of that stock by the end of this year for the most part.
Given the Crypto market, there isn’t a reason as to why these cards will run out of stock unless Nvidia deliberately restricts the supply to fabricate immense demand.
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