On a roll of late, aren't we AMD? Just when you thought the fun was slowing over in Taiwan, in flies this: the world's first official DirectX 11-friendly GPU demonstration. We also learned that DX 11 (and presumably, AMD cards to push it) will debut prior to the dawn of 2010, but outside of that, most everything else is being kept under wraps. Indeed, the demo was mostly to show that things were still on track and for the chip maker to assure us all that it will "deliver DirectX 11 first." Alright, AMD -- now you've something to prove. Full release is after the break.

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.

Movin' on up in the world, are we S3? Just a month after the VIA-owned S3 Graphics returned to the scene with its Chrome 400 line of discrete graphics cards comes this, the predictably named Chrome 500 series. The new line is capable of handling Blu-ray / streaming HD video playback and provides support for DirectX 10.1 and OpenGL 3.0 applications. You'll also find a built-in Dolby 7.1 digital surround sound processor, GPGPU (General Purpose GPU) technology, ChromotionHD (which offloads video processing from the CPU) and compatibility with DisplayPort / HDMI / DVI (with HDCP). The first off the blocks is the 512MB Chrome 530 GT (pictured), and the bargain-bin-styled $44.95 should work wonders given the economy.

While Intel's Larrabee might not be a household name for consumers just yet, it's certainly at the table where Nvidia and AMD/ATI eat. The many-core (8 to 48, at least, according to that Intel graphic) x86 chip runs all your existing apps while tossing in support for OpenGL and DirectX thus eliminating the need for a discrete graphics chip. At least that's the plan. While the exact number of cores remains a secret as does the performance of each core compared to current GPUs, given the importance Intel places on Larrabee, it's reasonable to assume that an 8-core chip will launch in 2009 or 2010 with comparable performance to GPUs on the market at that time. Intel does say that Larrabee cores will scale "almost linearly" (read: within 10%) in games; that means that a 16-core chip will offer nearly twice the performance of an 8-core chip, 32-cores twice that of 16, and so on. Apparently this has already been proven in-house with Intel name-dropping Larrabee-coded titles such as Gears of War, FEAR, and Half-Life 2, Episode 2. It's no coincidence then to hear that Intel's first Larrabee product will target PC gamers. Click through if you're just dying to read about Larrabee's 1024 bits-wide bi-directional ring network and other bits of technical wonderment sure to create at least the hint of a silicon malaise.

[Via CNET and Washington Post, Thanks Dan R.]

Mac users, listen up: a video has appeared on YouTube that shows an internal beta version of VMWare running Windows games at full speed from within Mac OS X. Accompanying this intriguing video is a blog post from Regis Duchesne, a developer at VMWare, who confirms that there are internal beta builds of the program that support DirectX 8.1 virtualization. Regis notes that VMWare is currently working on DirectX 9 support and therefore, compatibility with Windows Vista's Aero interface technology. As nice as compatibility with Aero sounds, the main appeal for the first version of VMWare to support DirectX will be convenience: instead of having to boot into a Windows XP partition or deal with other flakier programs, Mac users will be able to run Windows games at full speed from within Mac OS X. Since VMWare's primary competitor -- Parallels -- has also promised to implement DirectX virtualization into Parallels Desktop, it's still up in the air as to which company will be the first to include this feature in a retail offering. So, PC gaming fanboys, what are you going to do all day now that your favorite phrase -- "Mac gaming is an oxymoron" -- doesn't cut it on the Mac gaming forums anymore?

[Via TUAW]

While we've had plenty of time to digest Intel's path forward, we've been critiquing AMD's latest efforts rather than gazing down their intriguing roadmap. Nevertheless, a (presumably yawn-inducing) four-hour presentation yielded a few noteworthy tidbits about where AMD's headed, and how it plans to arrive. The firm insinuated that Intel's gazillion-core approach was simply rehashing the megahertz race, and said it would be focusing it efforts instead on Accelerated Processing Units (APUs). Although the composition is still a bit vague, the devices will supposedly be "multi-core chips that include any mix of processor cores and other dedicated processors," such as discrete units for graphics, physics, audio, video, encoding, etc. While a dash of this has already been divulged when we heard about Fusion, it looks likes AMD's getting pretty serious about it now. Additionally, the desktop roadmap didn't deviate from what we'd previously seen, but the firm plans to unveil a new power-conscience "Hawk" processor to replace the current Turion 64 X2 and Mobile Sempron chips. Moreover, it's working on offering up a hybrid graphics solution, which would see discrete GPUs disabled when unplugged from a power source, letting the integrated graphics set take over and conserve juice. Finally, the company plans to introduce yet another mobile chip (dubbed Griffin) in late 2007 that will reportedly support split power planes and HyperTransport 3.0, hopefully meaning that it'll be based on a quad-core architecture. While we don't exactly recommend sitting through the entire webcast, those who eat, sleep, and drink circuitry can hit the read link for the full (and we do mean full) skinny.

[Via TechReport, thanks Keaton]