The latest feature announced that will be available or is planned for WIndows 7 is Windows Advanced Rasterization Platform 10 (WARP10). This apparently will enable your CPU to work as a GPU to render graphics. It will be fully compatible with DX10 and will act as a software rasterizer to possibly end the need for integrated graphics processors (IGPs).
There is a lot of discussion going on regarding Microsoft and Intel and how this is likely another case of Microsoft acceding to Intel’s request so as to gain a headstart and possibly reduce the competition’s competitiveness or some such. Well whatever the case may be, we are here to discuss the potential implications of this feature for us. And as far as we can tell, this feature does not look like it will change much, because it needs a very high level CPU to get away with working as a GPU and to have enough juice to actually render games (or other graphics intensive tasks) playable/usable. This means that we’re looking at multi-core processors and possibly at the next generation of processors.
The low-end user with an IGP solution will have to be quite idiotic to add the load on to the CPU when the IGP can do the same task with the same results. So while in the future the WARP10 feature might actually prevent the need for IGPs, currently it is just a feature that will not help anyone as far as we can tell. This, even though a 800 MHz processor will work as a DX10 compatible GPU with WARP10.
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