Warp 10 3d to give Direct X 10 effects with a Direct X 9 card

Good news for gamers who are having a DirectX 9 graphics card and are not able to enjoy the Direct X 10 effects.But that’s all going to change with Windows 7.As u all know that Crysis is a Direct X 10 game and you need a Direct X 10 supported graphic cards to get all the eye candy and flashy effects. In Windows 7, you will experience the same graphics fidelity and detail whether you have a Direct3D 9-level graphics card or even no graphics card. The magic fairy dust which makes this possible is called Direct3D 10Level9 and Direct3D WARP10 respectively.

Direct3D 10Level9 is exactly what the name describes, it allows you to run Direct3D 10 applications on Direct3D 9 hardware with the same visual output but at the cost of performance penalties compared to running on native Direct3D 10 hardware.Now whats this WARP10 all about.WARP which stands for Windows Advanced Rasterization Platform is a complete implementation of Direct3D 10 in software form – that is using only the CPU. It’s even capable of anti-aliasing up to 8xMSAA and anisotropic filtering. What’s amazing is that it is parity with the output of a native Direct3D 10 device.

According to MSDN article they describe

The majority of the images appear almost identical between hardware and WARP10, where small differences sometimes occur we find they are within the tolerances defined by the Direct3D 10 specification.

Now every one is curious about how good is this.For this MSDN answers this was tested for Crysis game.So this is the benchmark results of WARP10 running 800×600 with lowest quality settings.

And compared to graphics cards.

Now you might be thinking by looking at the screens that is not so good.But remember in the WARP10 scenario the CPU is not only rendering the game now but also continuing to process everything else that it originally had to process with a graphics card. Taking that into consideration, I applaud it for even running at all. Remember this is Crysis.

If you’re gamer, obviously this is not plausible and the developers agree. “We don’t see WARP10 as a replacement for graphics hardware, particularly as reasonably performing low end Direct3D 10 discrete hardware is now available for under $25. The goal of WARP10 was to allow applications to target Direct3D 10 level hardware without having significantly different code paths or testing requirements when running on hardware or when running in software.”

Personally, I’m just glad the DirectX team is taking a positive turn for Direct3D backwards compatibility. Instead of just plainly not supporting older hardware, offering some alternatives to achieve the same visual result,.which after all the goal of Direct3D.What else u need if it can run Crysis in playable frame rates that too without a card.Rock on.

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