Unlocking Hashcat’s Full Potential: How GPU Optimization Reduced Cracking Time by 85% — A Wordlist Benchmark Breakdown
After optimizing Hashcat to recognize my NVIDIA RTX 4080 Super GPU as the default device and applying the two recommended modes (-w 4 and -O), I reduced the time to process an 8.4 billion password wordlist from 2 days to just 25 minutes compared to the default settings.
This writeup follows my previous Hashcat optimization guide, “A Complete Guide to Optimizing Hashcat: Use Your GPU Instead of CPU for 60–90% Faster Cracking”.
Wordlists
Every cybersecurity student or analyst is familiar with the go-to wordlist, RockYou.txt. In this writeup, I will be focusing on RockYou.txt, along with Crackstation.txt and RockYou2021.txt. Here are the stats of the three wordlists.
For all the Hashcat benchmarks, I am using an NVIDIA RTX 4080 Super Founders Edition (GPU) alongside an AMD Threadripper 3960X (CPU). To gather more comprehensive data, I tested with 3 hashes instead of just 1. The hash mode used is 500 (md5crypt) on Hashcat.
RockYou.txt
File size: 139.92 MB
Number of lines: 14.3M passwords
CPU time: 4 minutes, 10 seconds
GPU time: 34 seconds.
Crackstation.txt
File size: 15 GB
Number of lines: 1.5B passwords
CPU time: 8 hours, 37 minutes
GPU time: 48 minutes
RockYou2021.txt
File size: 100 GB
Number of lines: 8.4B passwords
CPU time: 2 days, 1 hour
GPU time: 2 hours, 47 minutes
The above benchmarks compare CPU time, where only my CPU was used with no optimization, to GPU time, where my GPU was utilized with the optimized settings (-w 4 and -O).
Here is a complete breakdown with and without optimization:
RockYou.txt
No optimization:
- CPU: 4 mins 35 secs
With optimization:
- 34 seconds without using (-O)
- 13 seconds with using (-O)
62% faster
- 9 seconds with (-O -w 4)
74% faster
Crackstation.net
No optimization:
- CPU: 8 hours, 37 minutes
With optimization:
- 48 minutes without (-O)
- 7 minutes, 40 seconds with (-O)
84% faster
- 4 minutes, 10 seconds with (-O -w 4)
91% faster
Rockyou2021
No optimization:
- CPU: 2 days, 1 hour
With optimization:
- 2 hours 47 minutes without (-O)
- 35 minutes with (-O)
79% faster
- 25 minutes with (-O -w 4)
85% faster
If you’re interested in learning how to optimize Hashcat, check out my previous writeup, “A Complete Guide to Optimizing Hashcat: Use Your GPU Instead of CPU for 60–90% Faster Cracking”.
