Sandra 2009 gets GPU support

Software maker SiSoftware is announcing its Sandra 2009, and it has GPU support. Sisoftware Sandra has been popular for a long time due to its rich graphics, multitude of CPU, memory and I/O tests, as well as easy-to-create summary reports in a variety of formats. The new GPU features are quite expensive as you'll be able to measure stuff like floating point computing power over the graphics processor (ATI & NVIDIA), yet also you get to measure memory bandwidth. Next to these two features we spot a Video Rendering benchmark which will deal with overall DirectX graphics rendering performance.

The NVIDIA GPUs are addressed through CUDA and the AMD/ATI adapters through CAL. Once DX 11 is here, we'll have a thing call compute shaders, and without any doubt SiSoft will then use that API to make their lives a little easier :)

Unfortunately, ATI/AMD does not have Vista support just yet and CAL is only 1.01 *beta*

The upcoming Sandra however has several new features:

New modules

• Graphics (GPGPU) Processing: Benchmark the graphics performance of the graphics processors (GPGPUs). Such operations are used by specialised software, e.g. scientific software, image manipulation, video decoders/encoders, games that make GPU performance pretty important.
• Graphics (GPGPU) Bandwidth: Benchmark the bandwidth of the memory of the graphics processors (GPGPUs) and the bandwidth of the bus that connects them to your computer. The speed at which the data can be sent to the GPGPUs, internally processed and the results sent back is as important as the processing power of the GPGPUs.
• Video (GFX) Rendering: Benchmark the graphics performance of the video adapters (GFXs). Shows how your graphics processors handle rendering in comparison to other typical graphics processors. Such operations are used by all graphics software, image manipulation, video decoders/encoders, games and modern operating systems.
• Video (GFX) Memory: Benchmark the bandwidth of the memory of the video adapters (GFXs) and the bandwidth of the bus that connects them to your computer.
• Cryptographic Performance: Benchmark the cryptographic performance of modern processors that support hardware cryptographic engines. The most common algorithms, AES (AES128, AES256) for encryption/decryption and SHA (SHA1, SHA256) for hashing are supported.

Sandra 2009 is not yet available for download, yet we expect it to be released real soon.