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AMD Won’t Be Limiting the Mining Performance of its Graphics Cards

It looks like AMD won’t be following NVIDIA in limiting the mining performance of its graphics cards. This was confirmed by the company’s product manager, Nish Neelalojanan in a recent press briefing. Stating that RDNA 1 and 2 were designed from the ground up for gaming, he explained that the inclusion of the Infinity Cache and a smaller external bus were selected to satisfy this very goal.

The short answer is no. We will not be blocking any workload, not just mining for that matter. That said, there are a couple of things. First of all, RDNA was designed from the ground up for gaming and RDNA 2 doubles up on this. And what I mean by this is, Infinity Cache and a smaller bus width were carefully chosen to hit a very specific gaming hit rate. However, mining specifically enjoys, or scales with, higher bandwidth and bus width so there are going to be limitations from an architectural level for mining itself.

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He further went on to say that the relatively lower bandwidth of the Big Navi graphics cards makes the cards less attractive for miners which is true. However, in today’s world where most high-end graphics cards are hard to come by, no miner will think twice before buying a Radeon RX 5000 or 6000 GPU. Although the former offer fairly decent performance in Ether mining, the latter is a step-down, with the RX 6700 XT being quite a bit slower than its predecessor in just about every Ethereum algorithm.

All our optimization, as always, is going to be gaming first, and we’ve optimized everything for gaming. Clearly, gamers are going to reap a ton of benefit from this, and it’s not going to be ideal for mining workload. That all said, in this market, it’s always a fun thing to watch.

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It’s also important to note that the supply of the RX 6000 series has been dismal, with even the grey markets like eBay seeing just a couple of dozen units in the first two months of 2021. AMD has assured the press that the supply of the RX 6700 XT will be markedly better but chatter on the market is that it will still be far from enough.

Areej Syed

Processors, PC gaming, and the past. I have been writing about computer hardware for over seven years with more than 5000 published articles. Started off during engineering college and haven't stopped since. Mass Effect, Dragon Age, Divinity, Torment, Baldur's Gate and so much more... Contact: areejs12@hardwaretimes.com.
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