OEMs ditching 3DMark for Sandra 2009?

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.”