Nvidia Said We Couldn't Game On This Crypto Mining Card...

What people said

theandrewbailey · 2025-12 · Reference

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] [VIDEO] [1] $4.3 billion out of $57 billion [LINK]

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mikepurvis · 2021-05 · Reference

There is some precedent for hacking ex-miner cards to route the video signal back to a motherboard output over the PCI bus: [VIDEO] With so many more of them out there, it'll be interesting to see if this becomes more of a thing. Alternatively, it's easy to imagine that depending on just how constrained these are, they might eventually find homes doing non-crypto headless DC workloads, such as deep learning stuff.

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freeflight · 2021-05 · Reference

> Nvidia is trying to get miners to buy mining-only cards, because those can't be sold to gamers down the line. Afaik Nvidia already tried that [0] but miners didn't really bite because the lack of resale value for those cards cut too much into their profits. [0] [VIDEO]

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