by Adrian Kingsley-Hughes
December 1st, 2008 @ 10:25 am

The other day the eagle-eyed Long Zheng noticed a document on Microsoft’s MSDN site outlining how Microsoft plans to allow DirectX 10 acceleration on the CPU. WARP (which stands for Windows Advanced Rasterization Platform) basically gives users DirectX 10/10.1 support without needing a GPU.

The minimum spec will call for an 800MHz CPU, and in return for this modest investment you get Direct3D 10 and 10.1 support, 8x multi-sampled anti-aliasing, anisotropic filtering and optional texture formats. According to Microsoft this is the perfect solution for a variety of situations:

* When the user does not have any Direct3D capable hardware
* When running as a service or in a server environment
* When no video card installed
* When a video driver is not available, or is not working correctly
* When a video card is out of memory, hangs or would take too many system resources to initialize.

Microsoft has also posted frames per second (FPS) performance data for CPU-powered DirectX, comparing running Crysis at 800×600 with all the quality settings on their lowest settings on a range of systems:

* Core i7 8 Core @ 3.0GHz - 7.36FPS
* Penryn 4 Core @ 3.0GHz - 5.69FPS
* Phenom 9550 4 Core @ 2.2GHz - 3.01FPS
* Core 2 Duo @ 2.6GHz - 2.83FPS