AMD will not impose cryptocurrency mining limits on its graphics cards, the company has confirmed.
AMD's Product Manager Nish Neelalojanan spoke about crypto mining limits in a recent briefing for the Radeon RX 6700XT, as reported by PC Gamer.
"We will not be blocking any workload, not just mining for that matter," Neelalojanan said.
However, Neelalojanan reinforced AMD's commitment for gaming, commenting: "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."
Why is AMD not restricting crypto mining?
In explaining the decision, Neelalojanan highlighted the limits of RDNA 2 for crypto mining. "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," said Neelalojanan.
"All our optimisation, as always, is going to be gaming first, and we've optimised 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."
Of course, AMD's GPU's are still used for mining purposes given their impressive processing power. The RX 6900 XT has a mining hash rate of 61.31 MH/s for Ethereum, according to BetterHash. This is compared to the RTX 3090's whopping 103.95 MH/s.
The difference between these two powerhouses is quite large, but 61.31 MH/s is still an impressive rate. For comparison, the upcoming NVIDIA CMP 50HX has a hash rate of just 45 MH/s.
Why has NVIDIA restricted crypto mining?
NVIDIA's justification for restricting cryptocurrency mining comes amid stock shortages for the latest RTX 30 Series GPUs.
"GeForce is made for gaming," the company said in announcing Ethereum hash rate limits for its RTX 3060 card. By limiting the hash rate for crypto mining, NVIDIA hopes this will deter miners from buying these graphics cards, leaving more stock for gamers.
NVIDIA is also releasing a bespoke crypto mining processor - the NVIDIA CMP. Designed specifically for mining, the CMP may take the pressure off NVIDIA's RTX 30 Series, although it looks to be quite expensive.
Previous rumours suggested AMD was manufacturing its own line of crypto mining processors, but with this recent development, we're not so sure.
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