Directx-11 wil not just render GPU on CPU as everyone is beating here... It will render CPU on GPU aswell like apple is efforting with OpenCL. So MS wins with GPU emulation on CPU.

Microsoft is touting Warp as a software fallback where the PC hardware is not up to the job.

Well done to the ~5 posters who have seen this, your score a +10 on the scale of comprehending the MSDN article. –10 to Linix/Mac fanboys for seeing the word Microsoft, frothing at the mouth. And –100 to the Inq for not reading the article they linked to in the first place.

A software fallback makes perfect sense on several fronts:

1. Older software that uses GDI/GDI+ gets a performance increase on Windows 7. GDI/GDI+ performance got walloped with Vista. Try running some VBA in Excel that builds graphs for example.
2. Direct 3D games. The article mentions device CAPS, that’s capabilities if I recall. Game coders have to examine what the device (graphics card) is capable of doing before trying to do it. EG: If its ATI and it’s model X do routine Y, otherwise do Z. The code should just run in software emulation. It will be easier for developers to at least run the code without it crashing and identify where the fallback to software is. They are then free to develop a better workaround without having crash dumps to understand. EG quicker game development.
3. And in my opinion, most important. The GUI, Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) was introduced with Vista and on XP. While I think it’s next to impossible to truly describe the potential impact of this, I’ll have a go.
a. It’s vector based. Resolution and device independent graphics for example. Coordinates are double precision, if someone makes a massive monitor or a monitor with 600 pixels per inch capability, WPF will still cope without the display looking crap.
b. Floating point precision colour. Put this in perspective, most colour values are byte based. One byte for red, another for blue, another for green and one more for alpha or opacity (transparency). A byte = 256 values. Ignoring the alpha channel, that’s 256x256x256 colours, or 16,777,216 colours. A single (32bit) can be positive or negative in value, so lets be conservative and only use positive values; that’s 3.402823e38 or 340,282,300,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000. Now multiply that by 3 for red, green and blue and you get: 120,846,900,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000. That should be enough colours to be getting on with. I imagine that display technology will take a while to catch up with a figure like that.
c. 3D. Developers can use 3D in their applications without an intimate knowledge of how the Direct 3D API works.
d. Recently, .net 3.5 SP1 introduced the ability for programmers to use shaders as well. It’s early days yet; so useful implementations are bit thin on the ground. But you can introduce motion blur when a user is scrolling through a list of photos for example.

All of this stuff does not come cheep, so MS are offloading as much as they can onto the GPU. But if the GPU fails for some reason, they don’t want GUI developers trying to understand why and code round the problem. Warp enables them to at least have the app run, regardless of hardware. They are then free to either fix the problem or up the hardware limits.

1. Windows 7 is actually going to be lighter than Vista. Its true.

2. "BUT CAN IT RUN CRYSIS??? LOL!"
If it can run Crysis, nevermind the framerate and resolution, it IS NOT WEAK.

Aside from the bad Star Trek humor..

Windows Vista really needed this feature, especially in light of Tablet PCs & Ultraportables. 

Right now Microsoft is competing against itself, being forced to sell XP on these low-power PCs - WARP10 provides a way around the hardware requirements of Vista, without having to cripple the OS. 

Even in Beta, Windows 7 boots faster and the memory footprint is smaller. That bodes well for ultraportables. I wouldn't be surprised if Microsoft created selectable install "profiles" for different types of PCs (e.g. Desktop/Laptop, Ultraportable, Customize...)

Trav

For the purpose for which it's intended (3D graphics, but not running Crysis) it makes a lot of sense. This harks backs to the days of SGI when a low end graphics card coupled with a fast CPU could outperform a higher end graphics card when the limits of that card (number of hardware lights etc) were passed.

It's also a huge improvement to know that DirectX 10.1 is always supported. Hopefully manufacturers won't use this as an excuse not to implement fast DirectX 10.1 in silicon,though..

"Microsoft's CPU list contains several imaginary, or at least publicly unannounced"

All CPU's listed in the linq'd page are real and available; a couple of them available for a few years now.

If it's the 8-core i7 throwing ya for a loop, that's reasonable. However, least forget the quads have HT back in the picture again. 

That's just 1 of 9 though, and the other 8 are pretty common. I just don't see one "imaginary" CPU, let alone a couple.

Or did I miss a section?

It IS fun to read "The minimum specification for WARP10 is the same as Windows Vista" in the tech pages though, as it follows up with some really rubbish figures. So WARP, logically, has undermined min-spec's as well I presume. If I had to guess, it'll take a $700 CPU in a $100 ghetto machine to begin to show worth, and that's just skewed. Even granny has a DX10 video card by now one would think :p

Oh, and Intel and Microsoft are viral enemies that aren't known to get along once in their lifespan. Neither converse, even less either bend on one knee.

MS is shooting an arrow over the Intel ship with regard to integrated graphics and in the mean time is offering what OpenGL proponets have slapped DirectX about for years, and that is fully software fall back for full hardware agnostic consistency.

And neither of these are good enough for even the nutty Inquirer? So if MS actually gives the Inquirer and new car it would be the wrong color uh?

1) MS is making DirectX be able to fully fall back to software (technology that actually came out of the XBox 360 nerds), so that anyone that even gets stuck with a crappy GPU can still utilize DX10 features in the UI or in meager games or give better WPF performance, and this is bad how again?

2) MS is in a way making fun of Intel's GPU division, by showing that their GPUs are pure crap that software can outperform on a medium CPU of today's standards. And this is supporting Intel how again?

3) The MS technology is not limited to Intel CPUs (unlike Apple's OS X technologies which ARE married to Intel specifically), and even has specific optimizations for the AMD family.

4) OS X is the 'crown' model you use to demonstrate GPU assisted interfaces? Are you high? Other than using the GPU as composer, and rather poorly, Apple does crap with GPUs. In contrast Vista shoves as much though the GPU as possible, even old GDI/GDI+, font rendering, bitmap compression, and also has a good GPU based Vector/Bitmap based composer with supporting vector API sets specifically for the GPU (WPF). Again, how is Apple doing things right? Has anyone even followed Apple and them promising to 'accelerate' drawing funtions since OS X was released, and yet have NOT done so to this day, with 10.4 with an optional switch to try to send stuff through the GPU that was so buggy, even Apple doesn't support it. Yet Vista is raming portions of 1990 Win3.1 drawing through the 3D GPU, wow, Apple is something to look up to if you are MS, right? Oh, ya only in Inquirer reality...

For the love of sanity, how to spin something MS is finally doing right to look like they are shitting on the world. Way to go Inquirer, this is a satire site, right?

Actually, it makes sense to move rendering back to software rather than rely on specialised hardware.

Even the lowliest of lowly modern CPUs now spend most of their time doing nothing, and we are marching faster and faster down the road of multi/many-core.

As much as they might proclaim the imminent death of Intel, NVidia have a real problem on their hands... how to justify the future of the GPU when CPUs have more than than enough idle power to take over their job.

The wheel is fast turning full cycle, and we will return to the days of full software rendering via general purpose CPU and O/S.

Tim Sweeny reckons that even the days of APIs like DirectX are numbered, and that we will be right back to devs creating their own rendering code with C++ ...although I’m not quite so convinced about that one.

They're wasting their time on this. What is this, a college thesis project? By the time Windows 7 ships 99% of all PCs would already have some credible 3D capability.

> By contrast, Intel's own DX10-capable IGP only managed 5.17 FPS, making it virtually redundant when coupled with a decent modern processor.

Presumably the CPU is able to offload work to the DX10 IGP, so it's less stressed. Why didn't Microsoft test this on a single- or dual-core CPU?

Mere CPU, with only 20% of load, can outperform GPU by near extra 20% better parformance? thats great stuff.

Maybe GPU needs some multi Core stuff to do weller. F.U.D. is thick in New Land of Multi Core & NT6, if it where sears, it'd be"Whats that Number again, WARP 2 NT069? Where did you steal it?" then sell product from cheapo warehouse instead, that fits BIG Monies.
Well, you can just about feel FUD Coming up & forcing one to instantly buy/Run Away.

Here its smiley face, hoping for more integration this winter. Eye Captn', Its Well Past WARP, & NOT Even Plugged In....
drashek

Yep, and hence the Intel PR about i7 being equivilent to adding a second graphics card. Of course, if we are talking about Intel's graphics, s*** x2 = twice as much s***. Nothing to brag about as far as I can tell.

Hopefully the EU can put these monopolies in their place for the good of customers.

There are just two tiny little problems:
1.Low-end GPU will take MUCH less power then high-end CPU working hard.

2.While low-end GPU does graphic magic cpu is often free to do other stuff... not when it does all the graphics.

You end up with something that is completely unuseable and eats your battery for breakfast. Way to go microsoft.

My mother changed to Ubunto one year ago. My list of needed programs without linux versions is getting worringly short for microsoft. I won't buy Vista for obvious reasons... seems like I won't buy Windows7 either, so there's no future for me in vole camp and I darn like those pretty and fast gpu accelerated guis.

They hurt graphic card sales as well.. no new graphic card for me as I won't have DX10 anyway.

With current cpu/gpu power I would say netbooks are the way to go. Enought of large, heavy and power hungry machines. it's just not possible when your system needs more resources and eats more battery life then you can throw at it. I mean.. hey, my PC is 100 times faster then several years ago and I still have to wait "ages" for windows to reboot or word to start. Screw it.

I can't help feel like theInq are digging in gutters and trenches these days to pick up something they can use as an excuse to sling some mud on MS. Hardware Rasterization have always been part of the DirectX SDK to allow developers to try out their code even when there's no hardware that currently supports the functions being used. But that isn't among the interesting points when there's mudslinging to be done. Just checking the list of goals of that document ought to have made this article non-existent.

This "backward" step is probably not to enable windows to run on more hardware, but it may be a sort of preparation for Larrabee. we can easily get graphics hardware capable of running vista in a very little amount of money. who knows, we might see better performance on Intel Larrabee than the current red and green parts. This actually might prove to be a big step forward. running graphics on general purpose hardware.

The obvious reason for this WARP thing is Larrabee and an easy way to run graphics directly on Larrabee hardware. Its essentially a software renderer and I'm sure it'll run very well on Larrabee, thank you very much.

for MS to handle lawsuits along the line of granting "Vista Capable Model" to sub-par computers than to dismiss a request from an influential friend.

"It must be nice to have powerful friends when you only have a piffling 80 per cent market share. "

I suppose you would prefer to have lots of friends that lose money every year and who are $5.5 Billion in debt - and who drag THEIR FRIENDS throught the court system all day long.

Yeah - we do too !

Puking and Suing Hector

Perhaps Microsoft should turn to a game engine to provide their flashy GUI. They seem to be able to do 3D with much fewer resources.