The supposed removal of the LHR limiter was first posted on Reddit by user Timbers007, who says they made the discovery when they set their RTX 3080 Ti to start mining. Usually, the limiter would kick in whenever an RTX card was detected to be mining traditional algorithms like Etchash and Autolykos. That wasn’t the case anymore, after Timbers007 updated the card’s drivers to the most recent one.
For the uninitiated, NVIDIA first introduced the LHR limiter in its RTX 30 Series graphics cards back in 2021. At the time, the implementation was put in place in an effort to stem the graphics card shortage, brought about primarily by GPU miners that were buying the card en masse. In order to mine Ethereum, the second most valuable cryptocurrency in the market. Performance-wise and without the LHR limiter in place, Timbers007 indicates with a screenshot that his card was averaging 112MH/s, which is more or less what a card like the RTX 3080 Ti is capable of achieving unlocked, especially on mining pools like NiceHash and NBMiner. For YouTuber Rapid Mining, they showed that their RTX 3060 model – the one that shipped out with LHR – also showed signs of benefiting from the new drivers, with the GPU hitting a hashrate of 47MH/s which again, is what the card more or less hits when the limiter is disabled or bypassed. One likely reason why NVIDIA has chosen now to remove the LHR limiter could be due to the recent shift of Ethereum from Proof-of-Work to Proof-of-Stake, also known as “The Merge”. Simply put, this move means that mining the digital coin is no longer profitable, as owners of the coin will now be required to put up their stake in the coin up as collateral. (Source: Videocardz, Reddit, Twitter)
