A well-known leaker with a stellar track record believes that Nvidia is planning to extend its Ethereum mining limiter, currently found in the RTX 3060 12GB, into the rumored RTX 3080 Ti. VideoCardz has also confirmed that Nvidia informed AIB partners that the mining limiter would be coming to the RTX 3080 Ti, making rumors for the existence of the RTX 3080 Ti even more likely.

There’s also a chance this limiter could be coming to the rumored RTX 3070 Ti, as well. This news should come as no surprise to anyone, as Nvidia has already introduced new mining-specific graphics cards that will arrive in the next few months. Now it is in Nvidia’s best interests, from a business perspective, to purposefully nerf future RTX 30-series GPUs hashrates to incentivize miners to grab Nvidia’s mining-specific GPUs.

Luckily for some people, Nvidia’s “older” RTX 30 series GPUs like the RTX 3090, 3080, 3070, and 3060 Ti will not receive the mining limiter. However, this might change soon, depending on Nvidia’s plans.

But if an RTX 3080 Ti and RTX 3070 Ti are slated to come out later this year, Nvidia could be killing off the vanilla RTX 3080 and RTX 3070 to make way for the more powerful SKUs. If so, it wouldn’t make much sense to go through all the extra effort of nerfing hash rates on the older Ampere GPUs (besides the 3060 TI) if they are to be discontinued anyway. 

We’ll have to see how this plays out in the future. As of right now, you can make a decent amount of money on the RTX 3060 12GB despite having the mining limiter in place. If Nvidia begins having supply issues with its mining cards and miners start getting desperate, there’s a good chance they will still buy any RTX 30-series GPU regardless.