Windows 7 WARP system to allow for DirectX 10 CPU acceleration

We've already heard that Microsoft plans to make use of GPU acceleration in Windows 7, but it looks like the company is also going to be doing its part for the GPU-less out there, with the OS's new so-called WARP system promising to allow for DirectX 10 acceleration using nothing more than a plain old CPU. Among other things, that's apparently being done to avoid a recurrence of the Vista-capable debacle that happened last time around, when some systems that were said to be capable of running the OS were, in fact, anything but. According to Microsoft, WARP (or Windows Advanced Rasterization Platform) will work with as little as an 800MHz CPU, although it says it'll work better on multi-core processors with SSE 4.1. To really put it to the test, Microsoft apparently even went so far as to run a few Crysis benchmarks with the system, and managed to clock in a blistering 7.36 fps frame rate at 800 x 600 on a Core i7-equipped PC, which is actually slightly better than what Intel's current integrated graphics were able to eke out.

[fischju @ Nov 28th 2008 12:37PM]

Every DX10 game I've played maxed out my CPU and GPU....where do they think the extra CPU cycles needed for this to be useful will come from?

[EdZ @ Nov 28th 2008 12:40PM]

It's not intended for gaming. It's intended for the 2d and 3d transforms used in decoding video and displaying applications.

[j_g_puff @ Nov 28th 2008 1:01PM]

Well, hang on a minute.

You only NEED all that crud if you insist on making your UI spin around the screen whilst fading out.

[fischju @ Nov 28th 2008 1:04PM]

Window 7's desktop manager will have DX10 acceleration from GPU. It will use vram instead of system ram.

I really don't see a use in this.

[EdZ @ Nov 28th 2008 1:18PM]

"You only NEED all that crud if you insist on making your UI spin around the screen whilst fading out."
Uh, DirectX handles 2D acceleration too, you know. It doesn't appear in the framebuffer by magic.

[Vanillacide @ Nov 28th 2008 2:15PM]

Surely this system is designed to take advantage of INTEL LARRABEE?

i.e. Intel's new (currently vaporware) competitor to GPU from NVIDIA and ATI that uses many small x86 cores instead of dedicated floating point processors (formerly called shaders). Larrabee is why NVIDIA now refer to shaders as "processor cores".

The first Larrabee graphics cards are due out in late 2009 / early 2010; which is the same time as Windows 7.

Coincidence?

[j_g_puff @ Nov 28th 2008 2:34PM]

Edz,

If it's too much for directfb, it's overkill.

In my book, at least.

[E71 @ Nov 29th 2008 5:26AM]

Games like Crysis and any other ones ahead of their time need to die!

Either that or their developers should release them when the top-of-the-line machines can churn out more than a measly 30-50fps.

[Elkin @ Nov 28th 2008 12:37PM]

yes it can play Crysis, leave it at that!! please!

[Jeff @ Nov 28th 2008 1:43PM]

But can it play Doom?

[Shinigami @ Nov 28th 2008 3:04PM]

Since when 7 fps is called "can play"?

[Yamikotai @ Nov 28th 2008 5:36PM]

It's the best way I can figure out to make the game as long as it should've been.

[Kelmon @ Nov 29th 2008 3:43AM]

The story kinda reminds me of when I tried playing Quake 2 at 1024*768 on my old Pentium 2 system BEFORE the 3DFX card was bought. It was like playing a game in slow motion where the motion was so slow that you have lots of time to appreciate the details. Mind you, survival times weren't high...

[I LOVE THE CAPS LOCK KEY @ Dec 2nd 2008 1:31AM]

My 486 could play doom, so are you suggesting the modern stuff can't?

[Al Bundy @ Nov 28th 2008 12:42PM]

shouldn't they be working on DX11? DX10 is tied to the wonderful legacy of Vista and we all know how well that OS turned out.

[eggothewaffle @ Nov 28th 2008 12:45PM]

Guess what driver framework DX11 is directly based off of? Or for that matter, what architecture is Windows 7 building off of?

I'm posting this from my Vista 64 machine. It has three GPUs (a 9800GX2 and an 8800GT) folding constantly...What was that you were saying about DX10 and Vista?

[Adam @ Nov 28th 2008 12:48PM]

Yeah because if you even spent 20 minutes with Vista you would see how crappy it is....

How can you bash something that you never used? Stop buying into what everyone says and try it. I bet you will find it is the best MS OS you ever used.

I just tried out Windows 7 beta build and it's also very nice :)

[cb88 @ Nov 28th 2008 4:15PM]

I am a Linux user but I do have considerable experience with Windows back to 9x none of which impressed me with thier durability or stability

for me the verdict is still out on Vista (although I must say i have philosophical differences ) my parents got a Vista x64 laptop and well see how it is running compared to when they bought it 3 months later

I will say that I did like Vista from the presentation standpoint but when I look at it from the standpoint of can I customise it? how efficient is it? I am really disappointed.

you can get Compiz running on a 400mhz PC with a basic geforce or radeon graphics card ... and Vista Aero interface provides LESS eyecandy and LESS customization options for instance the window close animation on Vista makes my eyes refocus werid.... on Linux I just switch to a difference plugin like "burn" which i prefer

on cohesive quality and presentation vista wins (the speech recognition is amazing compared to what was in office XP) On choice and options Linux wins and I can install KDE + compiz and get a fairly cohesive environment using less than 140mb ram or so with a couple programs open (you mileale will vary based on your choices.... have seen as low as 40mb on a Debian Linux desktop and that still isn't as low as you can go)

[Andir3.0 @ Nov 28th 2008 6:53PM]

"I bet you will find it is the best MS OS you ever used."

I did, and I found out XP was the best MS OSs I ever used. There were no unnecessary wizards, the control panel was nice and easy and I didn't have to "turn it back" to use it. I liked right click / properties instead of what Vista called it. I liked that not every window had a navigation bar eating up screen space. I liked the simply, non-resource hogging interface (classic, not Hasbro). I liked that the status bar was also minimal. I liked XP icons instead of the huge Vista icons. I did like the classic start menu from win2k even more than XPs start menu and even then I had to accept changing it back to the classic... having to set everything back to look like the old system I am used to isn't hard, but it's annoying as hell. I liked XP more than Vista as far as MS operating systems. Period. They changed things that didn't need changing. I switched to Ubuntu for my primary desktop and I use XP solely for gaming. My email, my browser, my office apps, all Linux. I guess I can always thank Microsoft for changing the OS so much I got tired of resetting all my preferences and now I can upgrade all my app code I want and leave my operating system interface alone.

[Lediur @ Nov 29th 2008 11:11PM]

@eggothewaffle:

Why do you have a 9800GX2 and an 8800GT? I thought that SLI only worked on symmetrical video cards.

[dazjorz @ Nov 30th 2008 7:48AM]

Adding to andir3.0's story my own personal experience: I've given Vista a few chances even if my favourite two OSes are XP and GNU/Linux (preferably Ubuntu for desktops and Debian for the rest) - and it looks nice, indeed, but I keep hitting problems. The OS seems to protect me from myself, which I don't want an OS to be doing - I know what I'm doing (I'm not talking about the popups saying "do you authorize this?" - these are good). Also, every time I've installed it in dual-boot with XP, it's fucked up my XP installation bad. I had to spend two days getting back into XP, and threw Vista away every time.
I heard that Windows Server 2008 is better. You can "hack" it into desktop mode, and it won't play your latest games, but it's fine as a desktop OS, and seemingly more stable and faster than XP. I should give it a try.

[OneLove @ Nov 28th 2008 12:43PM]

OS7 WARP

[Christian Martin @ Nov 28th 2008 12:52PM]

I'm surprised it took this many comments before someone made the OS/2 reference. Folks are slacking.

[j_g_puff @ Nov 28th 2008 12:59PM]

For those to young to remember, this is what he's refering to: (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OS/2)

I remember booting into OS/2 Warp when I got sick of Windows minesweeper - it had a whole different set of games. Then I got Commander Keen and both operating systems became irrelevant.

Ahhh...

[Thi mam(kris120890) @ Nov 28th 2008 1:21PM]

Being 18 I never used anything pre 95 but thi might get someone excited.

http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=WCiDM2hjtJ4

[Muhammed @ Nov 28th 2008 4:47PM]

commander keen, that game was awesome, my pc could run it at 55 fps then.
ah, good times.

[OneLove @ Nov 29th 2008 3:43PM]

I still have a brand new boxed copy of os/2 warp. lol.

[Edward @ Nov 29th 2008 5:13PM]

We're dating ourselves. I teach a university CS course, and none of my students had ever used Windows 98. With Windows XP coming up on 8 years old, these college freshmen were in the 5th grade when it was released!

[Thi mam(kris120890) @ Nov 28th 2008 12:45PM]

I'm about install the latest build to just see what it's like. But does this work for computers without a Discreet GPU.

[Jeff @ Nov 28th 2008 12:48PM]

It seems that exactly is what this feature is for...giving you some DX10 power on non-discrete GPU systems.

[Thi mam(kris120890) @ Nov 28th 2008 12:50PM]

So this is for the small things like running windows aero and similar things like that.

[Jeff @ Nov 28th 2008 12:56PM]

Pretty much...but I'd wager it'll get a few games playable like TF2 at lower resolutions on GMA950s which simply crashed before.

[Ayle @ Nov 28th 2008 1:46PM]

@Jeff
TF2 is still a DX9 game....

[JerkfacedFed @ Nov 28th 2008 2:01PM]

The point is that you dont need the DX10 compatible HARDWARE to get all the features of the OS. Obviously, having a discrete GPU is a hundred times faster, but now we wont face the problem of integrated Intel GPUs causing games to crash, or Aero not work on computers ever again.

Everyone that doesnt have a comment about this article, which i just explained just shut up because you dont know what youre talking about.

[fanman @ Nov 28th 2008 12:56PM]

Rasterization. Best word ever.

[Thi mam(kris120890) @ Nov 28th 2008 1:04PM]

Makes Jamaicans weep.

[Filip @ Nov 28th 2008 12:57PM]

Microsoft is really making this OS compatible with everything. I'm glad to see that win7 is finally going to put multi-core cpus to good use.

[Game_playa @ Nov 28th 2008 1:00PM]

Unrelated to this but: Is this a good gaming solution for atleast 2 years?(I have Vista Ultimate 64BIT and 17'' LCD)
http://secure.newegg.com/WishList/PublicWishDetail.aspx?WishListNumber=11535768

[Jeff @ Nov 28th 2008 1:04PM]

If you plan to overclock your CPU...I'd say it'll last you a good 1.5 years before needing to drop the resolution in some games. Then again depending on the resolution of your LCD...you could get a little extra kick...

[Skyride @ Nov 28th 2008 1:31PM]

Talking as someone who is constantly helping people with suggestions and building PC's, that setup looks fine. On your 17" monitor that card will last a long time. Thats the same card i put in PC's with 22" monitors. It can run crysis at medium on a 22" monitor FYI. Im sure it can handle whatever you would like to throw at it ove the next 2 years :)

[Eric @ Nov 28th 2008 1:18PM]

WARP factor 7...

[Rusty @ Nov 28th 2008 1:40PM]

Oh boy......I sure hope they get it right when it ships. With a name like WARP, I can just hear the jokes
if it doesn't work right. You know there will be tons of Star Trek jokes...

[alfatreze @ Nov 28th 2008 1:41PM]

WARP 10 Mr. Sulu.

Do you reckon they'll change the UI to Lcars?

[Cullen D @ Nov 28th 2008 1:44PM]

You do realize Long Zheng found this first, right? This is the third time in recent memory where you've sourced someone else leaching off his post... http://www.istartedsomething.com/20081126/direct3d-warp10-to-enable-you-to-play-dx10-crysis-using-software-renderer-only-albeit-slowly/

[Dan @ Nov 28th 2008 1:50PM]

OS/2 Warp was awesome. It had real multitasking a year or two before Win95 came out (and with Win95 you had to get new 32 bit applications in order to multitask).

[cb88 @ Nov 28th 2008 4:20PM]

didn't win 3.1 allow you to run dos applications in a window aka dosbox thus allowing you to switch between them?

[JerkfacedFed @ Nov 28th 2008 2:04PM]

I've always wanted to see how some games would perform when operating on just x86/x64 CPUs in software mode. Someone please find or post benchmarks of how Crysis performs on a super computer or 16+ physical CPUs!

[inteller @ Nov 28th 2008 2:12PM]

they won't support hybrid SLI setups, but they support this crap? Give me a break MS.

[tcc3 @ Nov 28th 2008 2:26PM]

How do you expect them to support hardware they don't make and drivers they don't write. Its not like Win7 prevents sli and crossfire. Nvidia and ati will provide support for their own products like they always have.

[inteller @ Nov 28th 2008 3:13PM]

oh you mean they only support the hardware the make....LIKE CPUS? WTF?