07-15-2017, 12:49 PM
That's right, hashcat no longer uses CUDA, but OpenCL. There's some speed drop caused by OpenCL but in Hashcat we can either avoid it by doing some workaround in the code (which requires SM >= 50) or simply it has no effect because the functions used in crypto are not related to floating point operations (it's all true integer operations). Switching to OpenCL also enabled hashcat to make use of CPU, FPGA, etc. There's a lot of good reasons. For cards < SM 50 there's a performance drop, but that's old GPU and since this is a application used in high-performance environments we don't care much. OpenCL 2.0 brings no advantage for Hashcat, that's why we can stick to OpenCL 1.2 (actually OpenCL 1.1 but sticking to OpenCL 1.2 makes it easier to live with the drivers).