Rumor mill: Nvidia's decision to limit the Ethereum mining performance of the RTX 3060 was a move welcomed by most gamers, and while the company said it wouldn't be hamstringing the performance of any current cards on the market, it never said anything about future models. According to new rumors, team green's upcoming RTX 3080 Ti---and probably the RTX 3070 Ti---will feature the same mining limiter.

When Nvidia revealed the RTX 3060, it said that new release drivers for the card can detect "specific attributes of the Ethereum cryptocurrency mining algorithm, and limit the hash rate, or cryptocurrency mining efficiency, by around 50 percent."

There were questions over whether this supposedly unhackable limiter would also affect other Ampere-based cards running the same driver, but the company confirmed it is not limiting the performance of GPUs already sold.

According to reliable hardware leaker Kopite7kimi, the same mining limiter will be coming to future Nvidia cards. He specifically mentions the long-rumored RTX 3080 Ti featuring "12G 19Gbps VRAM and an ETH mining nerf."

Videocardz reportedly confirmed that Nvidia has informed AIB partners about the mining limiter coming to the RTX 3080 Ti. Assuming this is the path Nvidia takes, expect any RTX 3070 Ti to be nerfed to reduced Ethereum hash rates, too. This could become standard practice for new RTX products, especially as Nvidia has its own mining-specific CMP cards.

The RTX 3080 Ti was originally predicted to come with 20GB GDDR6X 320-bit memory, though that's now expected to be 12GB GDDR6X 384-bit. It's also rumored to feature a GA102 GPU with 10,240 CUDA cores and could launch as early as April, but don't hold your breath for that release date.

A recent report from Jon Peddie Research claimed that buying a high-end card for mining would be "very foolish."

Masthead image credit: Wit Olszewski