OEMs leave 3DMark on the bench

AFTER YEARS OF enjoying a near monopoly on graphics card benchmarketing, it appears Futuremarks could be losing its seat, or bench rather, to rival Sisoft and its attractive sounding Sandra 2009 – officially released today.

Apparently fed up with Futuremarks for not yet officially supporting GPU physics, many OEM's (including Dell, Fujitsu Siemens and Medion) along with several websites have decided to make the switch and use Sandra instead, which has ported its suite of CPU tests to run on GPGPU. A very attractive quality indeed.

Sandra 2009, a suite of modules which lets users analyse their computers’ performance and see what makes them tick, gives special attention to general purpose graphics processing, as well as ways to measure framebuffer bandwidth. ‘She’ also puts Radeon, Geforce as well as Intel and AMD CPUs through their paces, and the Sisoft people have also added tests to run programmable shaders (DirectX 10.1, 10.0, 9c) for those users without GPGPU-capable cards or drivers.

But the shift, which seems to have taken quite a few industry veterans by surprise, also seems to vindicate the growing view that while in the past GPUs were only useful when it came to games or graphics, today they can also be used for heavy computational workloads and software other than video games. This doesn’t mean the end is nigh for the CPU by any means though. According to Sisoft’s head programmer, Adrian Silasi, “a very fast CPU is still needed to feed all the (GP)GPUs just like with current games.”

Not just a pretty face, another much-heralded feature of the new and remodelled Sandra is that the 2009 version DirectX tests support both Crossfire and SLI. Additionally, the GPGPU tests are multi-card compatible (for anything up to eight), but current drivers do need Crossfire/SLI to be disabled for multi-GPGPU to work.

Futuremark spokesman, Oliver Baltuch, diplomatically noted that “Futuremark welcomes all new benchmarks and generally thinks that the more benchmarks that are available for the public to use, the better informed decision that can be made when they make their purchase of new hardware.”

He added: “Sissoft Sandra has been a widely respected benchmark for many years and we hope that it continues to do very well in our industry.”

Bottom line, however, is that all this Sandra bullocks is probably good news for the folks down in ATI, because now that Sisoft has ported CPU benchmarks to vendor-specific programming environments (AMD CAL, Nvidia CUDA) to run on GPGPU, the firm might finally be able to see some sort of proper proof that physics really does run on its parts. µ