Hash rate

Hash rate is the speed at which a cracking tool can compute and compare candidate passwords against a target hash, measured in hashes per second (H/s). It is the number that turns an abstract keyspace into a real-world time estimate: divide the keyspace by the hash rate and you get roughly how long an exhaustive search takes.

Hash rate depends on both the hardware and the algorithm. A modern GPU computes raw MD5 or NTLM at tens of billions of hashes per second, because both are single-pass and cheap to compute. The same GPU drops to a few thousand hashes per second against bcrypt or sha512crypt, because those algorithms are deliberately iterated and, in bcrypt's case, memory-hard — see why fast hashes are dangerous for why that gap matters so much to defenders.

hashcat -b benchmarks every supported mode on your hardware, which is the quickest way to see this difference directly: run it once and compare the reported speed for -m 0 (MD5) against -m 3200 (bcrypt) on the same GPU.