DirectX 10 in software, without a DX10-compatible card
Aided by the WARP10 (Windows Advanced Rasterization Platform) software rasteriser, DirectX 10 applications can, reportedly, now also be executed on a machines main CPU and displayed without requiring a DirectX 10 capable graphics card. WARP10 also supports anti-aliasing and anisotropic filtering. According to an article on MSDN, the software rasteriser co-operates particularly well with multi-core processors and CPUs that support the SSE 4.1 instruction set extension.
However, WARP10 is not able, or supposed, to replace a graphics card. Published benchmark results show that the first-person shooter game Crysis, becomes jerky at 800×600 and the lowest-detail setting, even with a Core i7 processor, at an average rate of seven frames per second. Instead, WARP10 is intended to enable developers to test their DirectX 10 applications for rendering flaws independently of graphics cards and drivers. Microsoft provides a beta version of the WARP10 rasteriser in the November edition of the DirectX SDK. The final version is expected with Windows 7.
(lghp)
