Sandra 2009: serious competitor to 3DMark

18th September 2008

Companies Futuremarks, which for many years has had a monopoly among benchmarks manufacturers for graphics cards, may have to cede its pedestal. The competing firm Sisoft released the product named Sandra 2009, immediately after which a number of leading OEM-producers (including, Dell, Fujitsu, Siemens and Medion) announced their readiness to move to the new package.
Sandra 2009 is a set of tools, with the help of which users can analyze performance of its systems and detect the weakest link among the hardware components. The greatest interest from famous clients is caused by the two benchmarks, included in the new version and offering the possibility of the sample testing graphics processors of general-purpose (GPGPU), which can be used not only for processing graphics, but also for performing other calculations.
The package also includes new tests Video (GFX) Rendering Benchmark and Video (GFX) Memory Benchmark, the first of which allows estimating performance of the video adapter at rendering special effects, and the second tests the memory speed. And the test Cryptographic Performance Benchmark can be used to test the performance of today processors with embedded cryptographic functions and allows evaluating performance of the most common speed algorithms: AES (AES128 and AES256) and SHA (SHA1 and SHA256).