Contrary to what NVIDIA has decided with its GeForce RTX 3060 graphics cards, AMD will not be implementing any sort of cryptocurrency mining limiter in any of its Radeon RX 6000 Series GPUs. The claim stems from one of red team’s product managers, Nish Neelalojanan, who bluntly stated during a recent call that the company had no plans to hamper the performance of its products in any way. While RDNA 2 was strictly designed for gaming purposes, AMD believes that owners should be able to use them in any way that they see fit.
“The short answer is no,” Neelalojanan said in regard to a potential mining limiter during a Radeon RX 6700 XT pre-briefing call picked up by PC Gamer. “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.”
“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.”
According to Minerstat, AMD’s Radeon RX 6900 XT and Radeon RX 6800 XT graphics cards feature Ether hash rates of 60.38 MH/s and 59.44 MH/s, respectively. While this level of mining performance is significantly worse than the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3090, which boasts hash rates of up to 121.16 MH/s, it’s unlikely to stop cryptominers from stocking up on red team’s Navi 21 GPUs.