NiceHash defeats Nvidia’s GPU crypto-mining limits, does not appear to be a scam

Enlarge (credit: BTC Keychain)

Nvidia began releasing LHR (or “Lite Hash Rate”) graphics cards last year to slow down their cryptocurrency mining performance and make them less appealing to non-gamers. Late last week, crypto-mining platform NiceHash announced that it had finally found a way around those limitations and released an update for its QuickMiner software that promises full Ethereum mining performance on nearly all of the LHR-enabled GeForce RTX 3000-series GPUs.

Unlike past attempts to disable the LHR protections, NiceHash's workaround appears to be the real deal—Tom's Hardware was able to confirm the performance boosts using QuickMiner and a GeForce RTX 3080 Ti.

For now, NiceHash says that the LHR workaround will only work in Windows, with "no Linux support yet." The more flexible NiceHash Miner software doesn't include the workarounds yet, though it will soon. NiceHash also says that the software won't accelerate mining performance on newer GeForce cards that use version 3 of the LHR algorithm, a list that (for now) includes the RTX 3050 and the 12GB version of the RTX 3080 but which will presumably grow as Nvidia releases new GPUs and updated revisions for older GPUs.