Posts Tagged ‘ETH’

AMD Polaris ETH Mining Performance Drop Might Not Actually Happen

25, Jul 2017

If you remember last month we have warned that a possible Ethereum Hashrate Drop for Radeon RX400/RX500 GPUs is Incoming. The slow decrease of mining hashrate for Ethereum (ETH) on AMD Polaris-based GPUs was a bit puzzling as it was actually not related to the video memory, so 4GB and 8GB models were affected. Do note that at some point though cards with 4GB video memory might still start dropping in terms of mining performance anyway as the DAG size starts getting close to the amount of video memory available.

It turns out that AMD may actually be working on a driver fix to resolve the problem according to information published by Claymore on the Bitcointalk forum. Apparently the upcoming AMD Vega was also affected by the same problem, though it has been already resolved with driver fix and in two weeks or so a fix for Polaris may be release via a driver update as well. Hopefully a driver update that will not be WHQL and allow the use on AMD GPUs with modified video BIOSes as most AMD Polaris-based Ethereum GPU mining rigs are using modified memory straps for better performance.

On a side note, something regarding AMD’s new Vega GPUs for mining Ethereum from Claymore, in case you have missed it:

“Vega is … hot. In stock it takes about 400-450W in dual, 300-350W in ETH-only mode at about 33MH/s. And it’s throttling like hell. It’s very good in dual mining mode, but it’s too hot.”

So most likely the new AMD Vega GPUs will not turn out to be a great choice for mining, though who knows… people are using GTX 1080 Ti’s at 250W TDP or even more with some OC for mining and are happy with the results. Even though it might not be great for mining Ethereum, the new AMD Vega, just like with GTX 1080 Ti, might still end up a good solution for Equihash or any other popular altcoin algorithm for example.

Ethereum Hashrate Drop for Radeon RX400/RX500 GPUs is Incoming

18, Jun 2017

Do you remember how last year AMD Radeon R9 280X GPUs started dropping in terms of mining hashrate for Ethereum due to the growing DAG file size? Well, it seems that we are in for the same thing happening with the Radeon RX400/RX500 series of GPUs with 4/8GB VRAM in the next couple of months. We are currently at DAG epoch #129, but in the next 30-35 or so DAG epochs we are going to be seeing gradual drop in hashrate resulting in up to about 30% decrease from the current hashrate on the Radeon RX400/RX500 series of GPUs. It seems that other more powerful GPUs such as R9 290(x)/390(x) as well as Nvidia Pascal GPUs with more video memory (6GB/8GB+) will not be affected or the drop in performance will be much smaller to a level considered pretty much insignificant compared to what will happen with AMD’s Polaris GPUs.

You can easily check what will happen with your existing GPU mining hardware and if it will be affected in terms of performance and how much by adding the option -benchmark 130 to the Claymore ETH miner. Change the number 130 (the next Ethereum DAG epoch) to the DAG epoch you want to test with such as 140, 150, 160 and see how your hashrate will change or if it will change. The Ethash DAG changes every 30000 blocks which is roughly every 4-5 days and with Ethereum this is called a DAG epoch, so every few days we move to the next DAG epoch. As DAG epochs move further on they also grow in size and put more stress to the video cards that are being used for mining and as a result there is also some performance drop observed over time. The more powerful the GPUs is and the more video memory it has, the more likely it is to be able to handle better long term mining Ethereum.

Shortage of AMD Radeon RX 500 Series of GPUs on the Market

28, May 2017

With the switch from the RX 400 to the new RX 500 series (even if there is not much difference in hardware), AMD started having issues with availability. Older GPUs have been pretty much sold out where there were some left and the newer 570/580 models are pretty much out of stock everywhere. If there are some units left they are with an inflated price tag, because the people selling them want to make some extra bucks from the lack of availability and high demand. It is not known how long this lack of video cards will continue, but things were slowly progressing towards this negative outcome the whole month.

We are pretty sure that one of the reasons is mining and the recent peak of the price and profitability of Ethereum that inevitably leads to more and more new miners and mining rigs getting built. It seems however that AMD was really not ready for an increased demand after the release of the RX 500 series, even though RX 400 GPUs were already selling a lot. It may take a couple of weeks for things to get back to normal, unless the craze continues and unless AMD is actually having trouble making enough GPUs at the moment to cover the demand. Maybe the fact that the company is preparing for the release of their newer higher-end Vega solutions has something to do with the problem as well.

Miners are already looking at the alternatives of using Nvidia GPUs that are available plenty on the market, because they are not as good deal for Ethereum mining like the AMD cards in terms of price/performance. If you however take out the Ethash algorithm (Dagger-Hashimoto) out of the equation Nvidia’s Pascal GPUs are actually pretty good in terms of performance/power usage ratio… just not as good in memory intensive algorithms where GPU power is not required as much. Mining aside, gamers already have no other choice but to go for Nvidia if they are currently in the market for a new video card with AMD GPUs being out of stock.

The people that were mining a couple of years back during the Litecoin craze will most likely remember a similar situation where things got out of control for a while with the exchange rate of LTC exploding. This was only temporary as everyone was rushing to get into mining the top altcoin back then and then the price went down and things started to get back to normal. There are no guarantees that the same situation will happen again though, but don’t forget that we may be heading for a POW to POS switch for Ethereum by the end of the year…


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