I don't know, but it looks a bit stupid from their side to limit their card and "forbid" mining!?
Like you said:
Don't think Nvidia will get away with this. If Nvidia were to really implement this, there would be alternative drivers in no time that would unlock mining again.
It is impossible to go back and "not discover the wheel"... ATI was doing the opposite by creating cards designed for mining, and Nvidia is doing it in another way? I'm doing ETH mining with ATI cards, and I don't even use "official" drivers, so, I suppose that the same would happen with Nvidia...
Not sure if that move will make good to the image of the company either...
Great post! Thanks for sharing!
Totally agree, don't think this will ever work to artificially limit the mining capabilities of a graphics card by a driver update. Nvidia also wants to ship a different card series specifically for miners, which will certainly face the same availability issues (increased price, but also sold out) as their main line of GPUs.