Nvidia’s latest driver removed Lite Hash Rate limiter

NVIDIA released the GeForce Game Ready 522.25 WHQL driver yesterday, which supports the first DLSS 3 games and the latest GeForce RTX 4090 graphics cards, and optimizes the performance of DirectX 12, effectively improving the performance of GeForce RTX 30 series graphics cards.
According to VideoCardz, the improvements to the GeForce Game Ready 522.25 WHQL driver may be more than that, seemingly removing the Lite Hash Rate limiter. Redditor Timbers007 has tried it with GeForce RTX 3080 Ti and RTX 3060. In the latest version of the driver, the hash rate reached 112 MH/s and 47 MH/s respectively, which can confirm that NVIDIA has removed the relevant restrictions.

NVIDIA RTX 3080 Ti mining performance with GeForce 522.25 driver, Source: Reddit/Timbers007

Nvidia first added cryptocurrency-related restrictions when the GeForce RTX 3060 was released early last year. However, due to the 470.05 Beta driver of the Driver for CUDA on the SWL version released by NVIDIA, the so-called limitation exists in name only. After a few months, Nvidia rejoined a new and improved version of the cryptocurrency limiter last May with the GeForce RTX 30 LHR series.

Nvidia described these new versions of the chips as “Lite Hash Rate,” and at the time, with the exception of the highest-end GeForce RTX 3090, the rest of the GeForce RTX 30-series GPUs introduced a new version of the cryptocurrency limiter. The hash rate of the GeForce RTX 30 LHR series GPUs will be halved, but Nvidia hasn’t explained how the new cryptocurrency limiter does it. Subsequently, many developers have used various methods to bypass the restrictions of the LHR. However, with the weakening of the cryptocurrency market and the decline in consumer market demand, the impact on the pricing of graphics cards is relatively limited.