Direct3D WARP10 - play DX10 Crysis using sw renderer

Long Zheng reports that Windows 7 is supporting Direct3D 10 in software. For example, Crysis may be a Direct3D 10 game, but if you only have a Direct3D 9-level graphics card, it might only make your jaws open instead of hitting the floor. But that's all going to change comes Windows 7.

Simply put, 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. On the other hand, if your graphics functionality or partially or wholly non-existent either by design or due to anomalies (graphics driver), that's where WARP10 comes into play.

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. The MSDN article describes '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.'