A glimmer of hope for the ongoing Nvidia GeForce RTX 30 series inventory shortage came when the latest card in the series, the Nvidia GeForce RTX 3060, was released with an added limiter on digital currency mining efficiency. Sadly, there already seems to be a way around this, and it involves Nvidia's own drivers.

The idea behind the hash rate limiter, which halves the GeForce RTX 3060's ethereum mining capacity, was that fewer miners would buy up the already minimal inventory, leaving more stock for actual PC gamers. However, as Chinese site PC Watch first reported, the limiter is disabled simply by installing Nvidia's GeForce 470.05 beta driver.

Guru3D forum user hapghost seems to have confirmed this workaround by posting a screenshot of a fully operational Ethereum mining operation. 470.05 drivers are available through Microsoft's Windows Insider Program itself is not publicly available, as it is distributed to developers through Microsoft's Windows Insider Program, and in a statement to the Verge, Nvidia confirmed that the driver has since been removed.

Still, releasing a driver that completely negates a key feature of its own is quite a mess, and Nvidia spokesman Bryan Del Rizzo said last month that the limiter involved a "secure handshake between the driver, RTX 3060 silicon, and BIOS" This is what is preventing the deletion.

The closest thing to an upside here is that, in all likelihood, the defeat of the mining limiter won't actually change GPU availability much; as anyone who has looked for a place to buy an Nvidia GeForce RTX 3060 knows, the card was released on sold out immediately and has been extremely difficult to obtain ever since.

And it came with an intact limiter. So even if the Miners do eventually purchase the RTX 3060, there doesn't seem to be much inventory left for them to get their hands on.

The rumored Nvidia GeForce RTX 3080 Ti is said to have a similar mining limiter, and other Nvidia GPUs may do so in the future. However, it is unlikely to work well on the RTX 3060, and inventory levels may need to be increased the old-fashioned way: by increasing production.