I have not swapped CUDA 11 for CUDA 8 yet, but I did use Hashcat 3.0 on the GTX 560 Ti for a MD5 job and it was consistently giving me 900 to 930 MH/s and without errors or warnings. Whereas running Hashcat 4.0 results in warnings and errors, but it does work in a limited capacity. Hashrate drops from 900 MH/s to 270 MH/s using 4.0.
I have not tried Hashcat 5.0 or the current 6.2.5 again, I'm afraid they will not work at all. Although this seems to be related to file system access or user account setup. Because on my main account not even 3.0 worked last time I tried it. I did reinstall CUDA 11 since, making sure the installed doesn't overwrite my old Nvidia driver in the process, so maybe that fixed the thing. I will have to run it again under my main account to verify it works.
Does Hashcat require administrator privileges to take full advantage of the GPU?
Lastly, do I need to have the CUDA Toolkit installed at all? Aren't the CUDA libraries included with Hashcat anyway? I think I saw a message like "initializing cuda library... success" when running Hashcat 3.0. (That was in 6.2.5: "Successfully initialized NVIDIA CUDA library.")
Fun fact! I did the same MD5 job on another PC using only Intel iGPU, the UHD 630 found in Core i7-8700 from 2017 (1200 MHz boost variant, 192 shader units, 403.2 GFLOPS). I got 300 to 310 MH/s which is 2/3 less than what I'm getting with GTX 560 Ti. The same job was started 30 minutes after Intel UHD 630 on the on GTX 560 Ti, and it still finished before UHD 630. It's estimated that the UHD 630 will run for another 2 hours before it's finished. Meanwhile, the GTX 560 Ti has been idling and relaxing for the last 50 minutes.
So this "old" GTX 560 Ti from 2011 is still beating the Intel iGPU from 2017. This is a good indicator that using a dedicated GPU is much more preferable over integrated graphics, even if it's an older GPU model. It also shows the importance of using a software that can leverage the full potential of the hardware.
I have some more GPUs to test, before I decide what my next GPU will be, but Hashcat 3.0 will work well with GTX 560 Ti.
Code:
hashcat (v4.0.0) starting...
* Device #1: This hardware has outdated CUDA compute capability (2.1).
For modern OpenCL performance, upgrade to hardware that supports
CUDA compute capability version 5.0 (Maxwell) or higher.
* Device #1: WARNING! Kernel exec timeout is not disabled.
This may cause "CL_OUT_OF_RESOURCES" or related errors.
To disable the timeout, see: https://hashcat.net/q/timeoutpatch
nvmlDeviceGetCurrPcieLinkWidth(): Not Supported
nvmlDeviceGetClockInfo(): Not Supported
nvmlDeviceGetClockInfo(): Not Supported
nvmlDeviceGetTemperatureThreshold(): Not Supported
nvmlDeviceGetTemperatureThreshold(): Not Supported
nvmlDeviceGetUtilizationRates(): Not Supported
OpenCL Platform #1: NVIDIA Corporation
======================================
* Device #1: GeForce GTX 560 Ti, 256/1024 MB allocatable, 8MCUI have not tried Hashcat 5.0 or the current 6.2.5 again, I'm afraid they will not work at all. Although this seems to be related to file system access or user account setup. Because on my main account not even 3.0 worked last time I tried it. I did reinstall CUDA 11 since, making sure the installed doesn't overwrite my old Nvidia driver in the process, so maybe that fixed the thing. I will have to run it again under my main account to verify it works.
Does Hashcat require administrator privileges to take full advantage of the GPU?
Lastly, do I need to have the CUDA Toolkit installed at all? Aren't the CUDA libraries included with Hashcat anyway? I think I saw a message like "initializing cuda library... success" when running Hashcat 3.0. (That was in 6.2.5: "Successfully initialized NVIDIA CUDA library.")
Fun fact! I did the same MD5 job on another PC using only Intel iGPU, the UHD 630 found in Core i7-8700 from 2017 (1200 MHz boost variant, 192 shader units, 403.2 GFLOPS). I got 300 to 310 MH/s which is 2/3 less than what I'm getting with GTX 560 Ti. The same job was started 30 minutes after Intel UHD 630 on the on GTX 560 Ti, and it still finished before UHD 630. It's estimated that the UHD 630 will run for another 2 hours before it's finished. Meanwhile, the GTX 560 Ti has been idling and relaxing for the last 50 minutes.
So this "old" GTX 560 Ti from 2011 is still beating the Intel iGPU from 2017. This is a good indicator that using a dedicated GPU is much more preferable over integrated graphics, even if it's an older GPU model. It also shows the importance of using a software that can leverage the full potential of the hardware.
I have some more GPUs to test, before I decide what my next GPU will be, but Hashcat 3.0 will work well with GTX 560 Ti.