After installing the new version in my RIGS : Claymore miner v9.8 works fine, like the 9.7, but not really hashrate improvements with nVidia GPUs.
Ethereum difficulty is still very high and don't fall : the AMD DAG issues will make it it lower in the very near future...
The
difficulty will NOT go down as there is a "ice-age difficulty bomb" in place - "it's programmed to raise difficulty exponentially".
Difficulty does not only depend on the hashing power but also on the number of blocks mined and times passed since the last update.
Difficulty bomb graph:
https://etherchain.org/charts/difficultyBombDifficulty calculation:
https://gist.github.com/CJentzsch/c78768f9837afb8eef74