When NVIDIA announced the GeForce RTX 3060, the company made a firm decision to implement a mining performance limitation on the midrange Ampere graphics to deter miners (although they later “bundled” a driver and removed this limitation). However, in a statement from Nish Neelalojanan (AMD Product Manager), the company has clearly positioned itself against these limitations and says it does not intend to enforce them.
AMD’s position on mining
“The short answer is no”, said Nish Neelalojanan, Product Manager at AMD, when asked about a potential performance limiter to exploit during a pre-launch conference for the Radeon RX 6700 XT, “We will not block any workload, not just mining.”
That said, there are a few things to note. RDNA was designed from the ground up for gaming in the first place and RDNA2 doubles down on that. And what I mean by that is that Infinity Cache and its bus bandwidth have been carefully chosen to achieve a very specific gaming success rate. However, mining benefits from (or scales with) higher bandwidth and bus, so there will be architectural level limitations to the mining itself.
“All of our optimizations, as always, will be games first. Obviously, this will provide many benefits for gamers and it won’t be ideal for the workloads of users using our GPUs to mine cryptocurrencies. “
How powerful are AMD RDNA2 GPUs for mining?
Despite the fact that in this case NVIDIA graphics have proven to be the best performing ones for mining cryptocurrencies and in particular Ethereum, the Radeon RX 6700 XT is not bad either. The Navi 22 GPU offers 12GB of 16Gbps GDDR6 memory through a 192-bit memory interface, and while it’s not very impressive, it gets 384Gbps of memory bandwidth, and we all know how well it gets along. good. Ethereum with the large bandwidths.
In terms of raw Ethereum mining performance, this chart gets a hashrate of around 47.5 MH / s, which puts it on par with the NVIDIA RTX 3060 in absolute terms (yes, with the unlocked driver that NVIDIA leaked, i.e. without limitation).
While AMD does not pose barriers for cryptocurrency miners, Neelalojanan has made it clear that the manufacturer does not favor them either and that all of their devotion in development is focused on the players. For AMD, gamers are always high on their priority list, but neither will they be making a decision to “protect” them from the problems we all see in the market. After all, AMD is a company looking to sell their products, and they don’t care if their GPUs are sold for gaming or for mining, as long as they’re sold.
This position is not very laudable, but it is there. Either way, the Radeon RX 6700 XT hits the market today and we’ll see if the stock allows players or miners to get hold of units, because as things are with the stock lately, we might be faced with an output on paper and not real.
