SiSoftware Sandra 2009 Interview with Adrian Silasi
 

SiSoftware this week will release a new version of their popular application, Sandra. New in Sandra 2009, a handy system tool and analyzer, is GPU and in specific, a set Generic purpose GPU and GPU render tests. Next to that you'll also spot a test to measure framebuffer bandwidth.

Suffice that say, that's our cup of thee and therefore we wanted to fire off a small Q&A session at the lead programmer of SANDRA and Hardware Guru himself, Adrian Silasi. Topics involve SANDRA 2009, GPUs and compute API's like CUDA and CAL.

[Guru3D] With DirectX 11 slowly surfacing on that cyber horizon one fixed function in the pipeline will be Compute Shaders. Do you think CUDA and CAL will become a thing of the past once Microsoft opens up Compute Shaders through their API ?

On the Windows platform, judging by the past, it is highly likely that DirectX 11 will dominate, as supporting a single API is far better than supporting many vendor specific APIs. It is a pity DirectX 11 is not ready now; hopefully it will be out by the time other vendors (Intel, etc.) join the fray.