National Institute of Science and Technology (NIST) published the first Secure Hash Standard SHA-0 in 1993 as Federal Information Processing Standard publication (FIPS PUBS) which two years later was replaced by SHA-1 to improve the original design and added SHA-2 family by subsequent revisions of the FIPS. Most of the widely used cryptographic hash functions are under attack today. With the need to maintain a certain level of security, NIST had selected new cryptographic hash function through public competition. The winning algorithm, Keccak will not only have to establish a strong security, but also has to exhibit good performance and capability to run. In this context, we have analysed SHA-3 finalists along with the used standard SHA-2. The performances of respective algorithms are evaluated by computing cycles per byte. The empirical analysis shows that two SHA-3 finalists viz. Skein and BLAKE perform better which are nearly same as the performance of SHA-2.