Croley benchmarked the card through password cracking tool HashCat and was surprised at the increase in cracking performance compared to the RTX 3090 for “nearly every algorithm,”

The RTX 4090 was particularly adept at brute force, combinator, dictionary, mask, and rule-based attacks, but less good at a punch to the face or elbow strikes.

So if you create a cracking system with about eight RTX 4090 graphics cards you could uncover a password of eight characters in length in 48 minutes.  Silly passwords would be even faster.

Croley thinks it would still be too hard to take out a 15-character NTLM (Microsoft’s New Technology LAN Manager) password.

Croley replies: “If it’s randomly generated with something like a password manager, too long. There are 95 characters in the common ‘full character set’, and 95^15 is too large of a keyspace for pretty much anyone to attack. Doesn’t really matter how many 4090s or who they are, it’s still too big.”