Run DX10 games without a GPU thanks to WARP10

[Ian]

This is amazing if it lives up to how I understand it. Microsoft have created something called WARP10 - a high speed, fully conformant software rasterizer. It is shipping in beta form in the November 2008 DirectX SDK. WARP stands for Windows Advanced Rasterization Platform.

This means you can render DX10 graphics without having a GPU, as it's all done in software. Technically you could run Crysis or other games using it, but it will be as slow as a tortoise On a powerful system running Crysis at 800x600 the average FPS was 7.36.

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd285359.aspx

Have a read of that document if you are interested, it is a huge and very interesting development for Windows 7.

 

[ElPaso]

what's the use of such technology?

 

[Ian]

It means that if a game is designed with some DX10 features, but someone only has a DX9 graphics card then the Windows Resterizer could perform some of the effects and allow the person to run the game

There must be other uses too, but it's interesting to think that they can perform everything a DX10 GPU can do in just software.

 

[ElPaso]

i guess they are doing it to avoid the "vista capable" problem...

http://gizmodo.com/5100247/windows-7-will-run-fully-accelerated-graphics-from-your-cpu

 

[Ian]

Ah yes, very good point

It's amusing to think that the software renderer works better than an intel graphics chipset! :lol:

 

[ElPaso]

because intel sucks at making GPUs...