Windows 7 will use the CPU to provide 3D graphics acceleration

December 1st news, Microsoft said that the Windows Advanced Rasterization Platform 10 (WARP10) system in Windows 7 can run Direct3D 10 and 10.1 on the CPU, so there is no Provides improved graphics performance for PCs in the case of dedicated hardware. If Microsoft's plan to move graphics processing to the CPU is implemented in Windows 7, Microsoft will eliminate the hardware 3D graphics accelerator used in many PCs.

According to Microsoft's documentation, WARP provides fast graphics rendering in a variety of situations without the installation of hardware graphics devices. For example, when the user does not have Direct3D hardware installed, or when the video card has insufficient memory, WARP can run as a service or in a server environment.

Benchmarks show that this system is faster than Intel's integrated DirectX 10 graphics card. On a Core i7 system with 8 cores, 800x600 is set to run at the lowest resolution. The "Crysis" game has an average frame rate of 7.36 fps, while the Intel DirectX 10 integrated graphics chip is 5.17 fps.

Microsoft said in a file on the Microsoft Developer Network that because WARP10 makes heavy use of multiple CPU cores, the best performance of rasterization will be played on current quad-core CPUs.

This document states that WARP10 runs faster on machines configured with the SSE4.1 instruction set extension. We tested on SSE 4.1 systems with 8 cores and more cores. We believe that these systems will be high-end products within the Windows 7 claims cycle.

However, this technology is not a substitute for the dedicated hardware required for heavy rendering tasks, such as video games or dedicated hardware used in video production.