This document provides some frequently asked questions about Sandra. Please read the Help File as well!
Q: Does the benchmark uses the Doom/Quake engine? If not, why???
A: While we're immensily grateful to id software for releasing the code under GPL we could not use their engine. The first major reason is that we need a DirectX (v8 and later) version as well as OpenGL and to convert the engine to DirectX would be an awesome task. The other is that users already use the demo versions of Doom/Quake to benchmark.
Our engine is simple, but it is multi-threaded and does include interfaces for both DirectX (v8) and OpenGL. For now, that is good enough but we are adding more advanced features to it all the time.
Q: Why are the models, textures so simple?
A: We cannot afford to have a huge benchmark that is over 10MB of size like other popular video benchmarks and most of current game demos. Thus we need to keep everything to an absolutely minimum to archieve these goals.
Q: Does the benchmark use special instructions like 3D Now!/SSE(2)?
A: As with most of today's engines/games, most of the processing is done by the graphics procerssor and the DirectX/OpenGL libraries which do include optimisations for 3D Now!/SSE(2).