Nvidia’s New GeForce RTX Graphics Not So Attractive for Mining

21 Aug
2018

Nvidia has announced its new generation of GPUs with the new GeForce RTX platform and while they do seem interesting in terms of new graphics capabilities, they do not seem that attractive for miners at this point. The whole focus of the new NVIDIA Turing architecture utilize in the GeForce RTX platform is on real-time ray tracing, artificial intelligence, and programmable shading to make games even more realistic in terms of graphics. As far as performance for mining goes the new architecture will apparently not offer any significant performance improvements or power efficiency to be a really attractive option for miners. That is at least initially, unless the new Tensor Cores for the AI computing horsepower turn out to be usable for crypto as well and utilizing them could help drive performance up.

Price wise the new GeForce RTX 2080 Ti, the successor of the GTX 1080 Ti, the new GeForce RTX 2080, the successor of GTX 1080 and the new GeForce RTX 2070, the successor of the GTX 1070 are not that attractive either. That of course goes for the initially announced prices of the Founders Edition series from Nvidia that are available for pre-order on Nvidia’s website in some regions with expected delivery around mid-September. For gamers buying a single of these GPUs it might be fine, but for miners these prices are definitely not very attractive with the current crypto market conditions and the expected performance improvement in the range of up to 10-15% up, at least initially.

We are still eager to get our hands on the new Nvidia RTX GPUs and play around with them to get some first hand experience and see the performance numbers, but you should probably not get very excited just yet… if you are on the market for more GPUs, it might be a wiser idea to look for good deals on used video cards from people that are selling their mining equipment purchased last year.

Open and Closed Source PHI2 AMD GPU Miners Available

21 Aug
2018

If you are interested in mining LUXcoin (LUX) on AMD GPUs you might not be very happy that there are actually not that much miners available for the new PHI2 algorithm it currently uses, not to mention that Nvidia is dominating it performance wise. Still there is work being done to make AMD GPUs provide ood performance for PHI2 as well and there are currently two options available for you to try, one is closed source available only for Windows, but faster – the zjazz AMD miner, while the other one is an open source fork of sgminer with PHI2 support currently catching up in terms of performance – the sgminer-phi2-fancyIX with binary releases for Linux and Windows and source code.

The zjazz PHI2 AMD miner is really a new release in the form of a closed source miner with 1% developer fee and available only for Windows for the moment. The miner only supports newer AMD GPUs like the RX 400/500 series and VEGA and is currently the fastest performance wise. The open source release being developed by fancyIX as an sgminer fork is a little bit slower performance wise, but every new beta seems to be catching up pretty good in terms of performance improvement. There is no devfee and a Linux version is also available, though you also have the source code and can compile yourself as well, the miner also works on older AMD GPUs, though performance is not that good on them anyway.

– You can track the development of the opensource sgminer-phi2-fancyIX here on Bitcointalk…

New Even Faster Raven x16r/x16s Spmod-git #8 fork of ccminer Available

20 Aug
2018

One more update from sp on his open source and free fork of supminer (ccminer) called Raven x16r/x16s Spmod-git #8 (source) with a bit more extra performance optimizations that should bring faster x16R/X16S with 5 to 7% over the previous release. It is always good to have competition, especially with open source code, though the z-enemy miner 1.16 released a few days ago seems to be a bit faster.

As a recommendation to get the maximum performance with this miner you should try to overclock the memory 500 MHz or more (depending on your GPU) and mine with a fixed difficulty at the pool (normally set the difficulty parameter to around half of the hashrate of the mining rig), so for example for a 100 MHS rig you should set -p d=50 in the bat file for running the miner. There is also an upcoming fork for Raven (RVN) that should take care of the difficulty readjustment problems it is currently having, so you should keep an eye out for mining RVN to become interesting soon again and not only at times of low difficulty for half a day every few days.

– To download and try the latest even faster Raven x16r/x16s Spmod-git #8 miner…

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