How DAG and Hardware Degradation Affect GPU Cryptominers

A note of caution for the software engineers in our audience: we wrote this article for the cryptographic acolyte, and thus employ layman’s terms. We aimed to get regular people and casual miners up to speed, so if you’re looking for a DAG deep-dive or exhaustive exploration of hardware degradation, look here instead:
Both of these are excellent general resources on the topics at hand. Given Salad’s particular audience of crypto-mining gamers, we’re going to be a bit more focused in our approach. We’ll address how DAG and degradation concoct one of the most difficult barriers to successful mining: hardware efficiency vs. data bloat. Don’t worry, we’ll provide definitions too.
What the Hell is a DAG?
Unless you’re from Down Under, where dag means something like “a loveable weirdo,” the DAG stands for Directed Acyclic Graph. This means something very complicated in mathematical terms, but don’t worry about that. For us, the DAG is something like the Book of Life for a given cryptocurrency: a dataset that records transactions, miners, and allows secure mining to function.
Without the DAG, a mining algorithm has no way to track, notate, or reward your GPU’s hard work. Note that this is similar, but not the same as a cryptocurrency ledger, and I’ll direct you to this brilliant individual with a smarter explanation of why that is: Blockchain vs. DAG Technology
To get to our layman’s definition, we can summarize the DAG as such: a dataset which grows larger as:
- More miners join the network
- Said miners continue to mine
So the more people who mine, and the longer they stay mining, the more information the DAG has to keep track of and the bigger it gets. While this may not be true in every instance, a DAG should only grow over time and never get smaller. Let’s talk about why that’s bad business for us.
Why The DAG Matters For Miners
If you want to mine a particular coin, your hardware needs to process both the algorithm and the data associated with the coin’s history (the DAG). Running the algorithm is fairly simple for consumer GPUs, however: the DAG must fit into a graphics card’s memory in a single piece. It cannot be spliced or otherwise divided.
So, layman’s terms again: this means you need enough Video RAM (VRAM) to store the entirety of the DAG while you mine. As the DAG grows, GPUs with less memory will no longer be able to mine for that coin.
The Ethereum DAG was once small enough that 2GB VRAM cards like the NVIDIA GT 710 could mine ETH (those were the days…). Flashforward to 2019 and the DAG has bloated to such size that the 1050 Ti and many 4GB VRAM cards just can’t handle the load anymore.
Luckily, GPUs are getting bigger and badder by the year, but this has its caveats… also known as hardware degradation.
How Hardware Degradation Works And Consequences For Mining
After all that doom and DAG gloom, let’s begin this section with some good news:
The nature of electronics like GPUs is that, unlike mechanical hardware, they have no moving parts. Without said moving parts, friction can’t do its business and the hunk of circuitry can’t really degrade in the traditional sense of the word. GPUs can and will fail if stressed, but they do not drop in performance over time or “wear out.”
Wait, then what the Hell is Hardware Degradation?
Hardware degradation, in the context of Graphics Cards, pertains to the phenomenon of decreased performance relative to increasing demands over time. Stated plainly, your GPU performance begins to degrade the moment it’s furnished, since performance demands only grow larger over time.
In essence, it’s the same issue as the DAG, except generally applicable to games, software, etc.. For miners, this creates a simple formula: Will X GPU mine long enough to generate profit?
If you pick up a 1050 Ti today with the aim of making mula through mining, you’re simply unable to mine ETH to make money, no matter how well the coin is doing on the market. Even if you own a beefed-up RTX 2080 Ti, hardware degradation + DAG growth spells its eventual doom (for ETH, at least).
The Good News: Multiprotocol Mining And GPU Viability
The world of crypto mining is multivarious, and many coins don’t incorporate DAG infrastructure, and others are designed to have a fixed-size DAG which doesn’t grow over time. Yes, this means what you think: These coins can always be mined.
Which specific coin to turn to is another question entirely, one more concerned with profitability than hardware or tech considerations. Salad itself has recently made this move, enabling our users without beefy GPUs to mine:
Monero uses different hardware all together for mining (CPU), and Beam is not limited by the DAG as Ethereum is currently. There are tons and tons of coins out there without this limitation, it’s up to you (or your Salad App) as to which one your rig mines.
In short — tech and crypto both change at lightning speed. It can be hard for older hardware to keep up. Never expect that you can mine any coin forever, as that’s just not the case. If you want to keep making money through mining, monitor the markets and mining difficulty, then make adjustments accordingly. (or also have Salad do that for you).
That’s all chefs, thanks for reading.
By Jared Carpenter and Tim Clancy
