WARP Video Cards Back To The Future With Windows 7

The Truth 3:45 am on December 2, 2008 | 0 Permalink | Reply
Tags: Direct3D, microsoft (85), Microsoft Windows (3), Operating system (6), Random access memory (2), Streaming SIMD Extensions, Window Vista, Windows 7

So apparently Microsoft claims that some crazy piece of shit dubbed WARP10, a new feature in Windows 7, will allow people to play modern games on obsolete hardware. This sounds too good to be true. Hopefully they don’t make you sign over your soul first. I fail to believe that running Crysis would even be playable.

According to Microsoft,

When WARP10 is running on the CPU, we are limited compared to a graphics card in a number of ways. The front side bus speed of a CPU is typically around or under 10 GB/s whereas a graphics card often has dedicated memory that is able to take advantage of 20-100 GB/s or more of graphics bandwidth. Graphics hardware also has fixed function units that can perform complex and expensive tasks like texture filtering, format decompression or conversions asynchronously with very little overhead or power cost. Performing these operations on a typical CPU is expensive in terms of both power consumption and performance cost in cycles.

* Fully supports all Direct3D 10 and 10.1 feature
o Fully supports all the precision requirements of the Direct3D 10 and 10.1 specification
o Supports Direct3D 11 when used with FeatureLevel 9_1, 9_2, 9_3, 10_0 and 10_1
o Supports all optional texture formats, such as multi-sample render targets and sampling from float surfaces.
o Supports anti-aliased, high quality rendering up to 8x MSAA.
o Supports anisotropic filtering
o Supports 32 and 64 bit applications as well as large address aware 32 bit applications.
* The minimum specification for WARP10 is the same as Windows Vista, specifically:
o Minimum 800MHz CPU.
o MMX, SSE or SSE2 is *not* required
o Minimum 512MB of RAM.