When will 2GB GPUs stop mining ETH ?

adaseb · February 2016

Just wondering what approx date will mining end for 2GB GPUs like the R9 270X/380 ?

There are many good deals on the R9 270X which get like 15Mh/s but how many more weeks/months is mining possible with those GPUs?

happytreefriends · February 2016

ETH will change to PoS before that becomes an issue this year I'd think.

bluebox · February 2016

@happytreefriends, @dlehenky mentioned the DAG size not reaching 2GB until mid-2017 at the current rate of file size increase. It started out at 1GB six+ months ago, it is still less than 1.4GB. No-one can predict with authority if and when the PoS switch will happen, so much is dependent on the devs and funding, but anyone claiming "in a couple weeks/months" are just FUDding others out of mining it and don't know what they're saying.

What I do know is there are a lot of people in here and in bitcointalk who've not taken action over the past weeks/months, and continue to lose out while the rest of us have been mining. Pretty soon they'll have to double or triple their hashrate (on higher difficulty, yet) just to catch up, only to find it went PoS on them too soon to recoup expenses.

happytreefriends · February 2016

Everywhere I read people expect it to switch to PoS later this year , not 2017..Take it as you may, but people should know the ups and down before spending thousands on rigs only to have it be useless for ETH after a few months.

happytreefriends · February 2016

Trust me. If it can be delayed 'till 2017, I'm all FOR IT.

dlehenky · February 2016

@happytreefriends In the end, no one knows, but given that PoS was never envisioned until the Serenity release, and we haven't even gotten to the Homestead release, yet, I don't believe PoS is happening within a few months. Homestead will be the first hard fork, and I believe, although the changes are rather minor, that it is taking quite a bit of the dev' time to plan a smooth transition. Nonetheless, the difficulty continues to climb as more and more miners jump on the bandwagon, which in and of itself is dropping the profitability everyday. So goes the inevitable uncertainty of mining

happytreefriends · February 2016

Yeah, just like with everything else. At least there are no ASIC's yet out for ETH, so that is a plus.

dlehenky · February 2016

@happytreefriends Given the time horizon for the eventual, but certain, switch to PoS, I don't see any incentive for anyone to fund an asic development. Not to mention the much higher cost/complexity of an asic that can handle the DAG.

adaseb · February 2016

I read that after 1280MB DAG size, most AMD cards can't mine. Is that true?

restless · February 2016

no, even 7850 with 2GB mine fine

dlehenky · February 2016

I understood that older Nvidia GPUs were the ones having a lot of problems, not so much with AMD.

flagg · February 2016

Just because your card has 2GB doesn't mean you can malloc 2GB in one chunk.
I have 3x270's and one of them (a Powercolor) can only allocate 1.32 GB in a single chunk so it i's already unusable. the other 2 can do 1.39 GB so the are still running, but in a couple of weeks the DAG will be too large.
"ethminer --list-devices" will show the maximum amount of memory that your card can allocate in one chunk.

Edit: I should have done some research before posting this, many people had suggested raising the max alloc with "export GPU_MAX_ALLOC_PERCENT=100", this had no effect on my cards so I assumed I was stuck. Turns out the version of the AMD library I have wants "export GPU_SINGLE_ALLOC_PERCENT=100". All three cards are now back to mining.

adaseb · February 2016

No wonder my 6990 can't mine ETH, since it can only allocate 500MB

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When will 2GB GPUs stop mining ETH ?

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