hashcat Forum

Could somebody please explain how an Nvidia card could be faster at gaming yet much much slower at cracking passwords.

Lets compare two similar late model cards. The Geforce Gtx 670 and the Radeon 7970.

PassMark G3D Mark Benchmark.
Benchmark

Gtx 670 = 5335
Radeon 7970 = 5,039

As we can see the Gtx 670 benchmarks slightly higher

Hash Cat WPA speed GPU estimation.
WPA speeds

Gtx 670 = 23,791
Radeon 7970 = 114,679

The Radeon card can crack a WPA pass close to 5 times faster!!!

These two cards are fairly similar they have almost identical Core Clock speeds and price tags.

ATI cards have much more cores (SP) which is very important.

GeForce GTX670 1344 cores * 915 Mhz
VS
Radeon HD 7970 2048 cores * 925 Mhz

Even with double the cores it still amazes me nearly 5x faster crack speeds.

Well, the ice began to thaw, NV is slowly getting better, at least currently.
Check Titan's performance vs 7970.

The main reasons for AMD cards are faster than NV cards in general are:

- AMD GPU has more raw integer power (more SP), floating point is not important in crypto.
- AMD GPU/XOP CPU have a much better instruction set (BIT_SELECT, BFI_INT) for calculating crypto stuff.