Linus Tech Tips
10 HN mentions · mentioned in 5 months, 2020–2025
16:37 · 6.1M views · Jan 14, 2019
Linus Tech Tips tests a Chinese mining-only Nvidia card, hacked with a modified driver so it can render games and output video through an integrated GPU.
HN cites it as precedent for repurposing mining-only GPUs for graphics, in threads about Nvidia limiting mining on gaming cards.
10 comments from Hacker News
I do hate miners But I'm concerned that a company can tell you what you can or can't do with your hardware. Where is the spirit behind the hacker community, Jailbreaking iPhones, the right to repair, the ban of tattoos that prevented the use of Linux on PCs,... That's a very concerning move from me. Also, for a company that does morale : (1) Nvidia's marketing is one of the best for making old products look obsolete and replaceable. Most gamers would do great with their old gen card, they just don't need to upgrade already. But they reserve cards for them so that they can create as much e-waste as they want (2) they could just have prevented supply issues if their supply chains were diverse and resilient. But it turns out they aren't. And it's not something that was asked by the gamers (3) for a company that's focused around gamers, they have already prevented powerful "crypto" GPUs from being repurposed into gaming gear, as featured in LTT this video
Sounds like it's time to crack some NVIDIA drivers. I already do it for the video encoding limitations, why not this too? Miners are willing to go to some really hacky extremes, reflashing firmwares, custom fan mods, extreme overclock configurations, etc to maximize hashrates and certainly won't care if they have to jump through some hoops to patch a specific version of the Linux driver or enable unsigned drivers on Windows, as long as they make more profit. Good luck with this one NVIDIA but you're playing a losing game. As soon as one un-restricted version of the driver exists, this is as good as useless and demand will be the same as ever for these cards unless they're able to ship CMP cards at a very high rate, but my understanding is the restriction here is silicon. Let's not forget that last time they produced "mining only" cards, people managed to crack the drivers to render graphics too... this is no exception. this video
There's a sliver of hope that the mining cards will be reusable as general purpose gpus by having the card stream its output to an integrated gpu. I first heard about using the p106-p90 cards on Windows with a modified driver via a LTT video [1]. I later read a blog post where someone claimed that the card was plug-and-play on Pop!_OS (a Linux distro) [2]. I think this is fairly well known at this point. I would be very curious to see how many were actually reused, though. I remember seeing a listing for a large number of p100 cards a few months ago, but I don't see any listings now. Were they scooped up and reused, or did the sellers give up and trash them? [1] this video [2] [LINK] (search for "following up")
LTT did something similar with a mining "GPU" several years ago.[0] It involved buying a mining card with modified firmware and installing a modified and unsigned driver which shoved the rendered frames into the integrated GPU to output. It's possible these datacenter AI GPUs are built so different from conventional GPUs that they lack required hardware to draw polygons, like ROPs and texture units. Why waste chip engineering time and silicon die space to support applications that a product isn't designed for? Let me remind you that gaming is a small slice of NVidia's balance sheet[1], so it makes sense to not have to use one chip design for everything. [0] this video [1] $4.3 billion out of $57 billion [LINK]
While officially impossible, theoretically it should be work, in the same way as laptop GPUs (the dedicated GPU gives the rendered image back to the integrated GPU for seamless switching instead of outputing it directly). It has been tried 2 years ago on LinusTechTips: this video TL;DW: Very weird and extremely unofficial, but it can be done. These might still be some cheap rendering cards on Linux when they're used up.