WARP

I recently read about the Windows Advanced Rasterization Platform (WARP), which is a software rasterizer that will ship as part of Windows 7. WARP is targeted at:

Casual Games: Games have simple rendering requirements but also want the ability to use impressive visual effects that can be hardware accelerated. The majority of the best selling game titles for Windows are either simulations or casual games, neither of which requires high performance graphics, but both styles of games greatly benefit from modern shader based graphics and the ability to scale on hardware if present.

Existing Non-Gaming Applications: There is a large gamut of graphical applications that want to minimize the number of code paths in their rendering layer. WARP10 enables these applications to implement a single Direct3D 10, 10.1, or 11 code-path that can target a very large number of machine configurations.

Advanced Rendering Games: Game developers that want to isolate graphics card or driver specific rendering errors. We believe that all games, even extremely graphically demanding games would benefit from being able to render their content using WARP to validate that any visual artifacts they might experience are due to rendering errors or problems with hardware or drivers.

Using WARP as a tool for isolating rendering errors is understandable, but as a fallback for DirectX 10 casual games or non-gaming applications attempting to run on a PC w/o a DX10 GPU, a few things pop into my mind.

  • As a fallback mechanism, it goes back too far. We’re talking about going from DX10 -> software rasterization. There’s still lots of graphics hardware out there that targeted previous versions of DirectX, at the very least DX7, DX8, and DX9. Why not allow for seamless fallback to these earlier classes of graphics hardware, instead of a making a gigantic leap backwards to software rasterization? From a developer’s perspective, there would be a real benefit here in writing a DX10 codepath and having it run on older hardware.
  • DX10 adoption is slow to non-existent due to the slow adoption rate of Windows Vista. Unless Microsoft is able to generate massive demand for Windows 7, WARP will have little impact due to the little impact of DX10.
  • A project like WARP seems to be based around the mentality that a GPU is something special for a PC instead of a requirement. Versus software rasterization, GPU rasterization is orders of magnitude faster and the price of a decent card is under $50. Why is setting a GPU requirement such an endeavor, for Microsoft of all companies?!
  • On performance, WARP beats Intel integrated graphics. This really isn’t a surprise or any sort of accomplishment. Intel is really just selling overpriced garbage here.
  • Perhaps Microsoft working on a project like WARP instead of setting stricter graphics hardware requirements for Windows 7 is due to another shady deal with Intel. Remember the one with Vista.

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