Sisoft Sandra has for long been considered a reliable benchmark suite for measuring performance through synthetic tests. The latest version, 2009, now offers support for measuring the performance of graphics card during so called GPGPU calculations where the graphics card does more than just 3D. This concept offers a big advantage for multithreaded applications with more convenient and many times faster execution.
In general terms the performance of the graphics card has been measured in a variety of ways with previous versions. Most of the benchmarks have rasterized a number of pictures for a certain period of time to see how fast the GPU is. Lately, the potential of graphics cards have been looked at from a broader perspective. The term GPGPU has been used to describe other kind of work than calculating 3D objects. For example raytracing, folding proteins, doing more general work usually performed by the CPU, such as applying a filter to an image in Photoshop.
Software manufacturers have adapted this new trend of making the graphics card do more of the work and we will certainly see more and more programs supporting multithreading, both with CPUs and GPUs. Adobe is a prominent software company that has been rumored to support GPGPU processing with its coming version of Photoshop. With that said, future applications may very well make better use of the awesome power available with modern GPUs.
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