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MS Says Windows 7 Will Run DirectX 10 On the CPU
arcticstoat writes "In what could be seen as an easy answer to the Vista-capable debacle, Microsoft has introduced a 'fully conformant software rasterizer' called WARP (Windows Advanced Rasterization Platform) 10, which does away with the need for a dedicated hardware 3D accelerator altogether. Microsoft says that WARP 10 will support all the features and precision requirements of Direct3D 10 and 10.1, as well as up to 8x multi-sampled anti-aliasing, anisotropic filtering and all optional texture formats. The minimum CPU spec needed is just 800MHz, and it doesn't even need MMX or SSE, although it will work much quicker on multi-core CPUs with SSE 4.1. Of course, software rendering on a single desktop CPU isn't going to be able to compete with decent dedicated 3D graphics cards when it comes to high-end games, but Microsoft has released some interesting benchmarks that show the system to be quicker than Intel's current integrated DirectX 10 graphics. Running Crysis at 800 x 600 with the lowest quality settings, an eight-core Core i7 system managed an average frame rate of 7.36fps, compared with 5.17fps from Intel's DirectX 10 integrated graphics."
So we can play things at 7fps with ultra low settings. Whoopee.
Seriously, buy a goddamn graphics card.
What a revolutionary & useful idea.
In other news, Intel graphics chips said to be designed for minimal power draw rather than all out performance. This power draw is decidedly not beaten by running a software renderer that will stress the CPU till it sucks power like an electric chair as the CPU is only general hardware, not specific. More at 11.
"To any truly impartial person, it would be obvious that I am right."
they've had an idea, those BASTARDS!
I fucking well hope that doesnt mean it doesnt make use of them. seems like a waste of time coding it so it can run without (what today is considered) standard fucking features of a cpu.
after vista, the os not capable of running useably on older hardware, it seems a bit dumb that they're not trying to claim they can do dx10 in software on an 800mhz cpu. but i guess thats why MS just keeps slipping, they have no fucking direction. you already forced all your customers to buy new PCs for vista. now is not the time to start worrying about running on non-vista capable hardware. those people are no longer your customers
How much is an 8-core system going to cost vs the system with integrated graphics? At that point, it seems wiser to invest more money in a graphics card than in faster CPUs if that's what you're going to be doing.
By far the more useful thing is that it's probably better for development because the driver developers will have a reference point of how the graphics are supposed to render. Also, larger game companies will be able to point out these differences to get bug fixes out of the graphics card companies. "Your graphics card renders this incorrectly with regards to the reference, fix it" is much more forceful than "your graphics card behaves differently than your competitor".
"Running Crysis at 800 x 600 with the lowest quality settings, an eight-core Core i7 system managed an average frame rate of 7.36fps, compared with 5.17fps from Intel's DirectX 10 integrated graphics."
So the game went from unplayable at the lowest settings possible, to being still unplayable at the lowest settings possible?
Great move MS, youv'e really solved a problem there.
cmd-q.co.uk - some sort of stupid fucking internet bullshit
Does anyone else remember the 'good old days' when certain 3D graphics cards (the ViRGE comes to mind), were actually SLOWER than software renderers?
The term used then was 'decelerator' and I think MS's stupid decision to (once again) bow to Intel on this should share the same term.
How long will it take for true 3D acceleration to become an expected standard feature on PC's?
"...Well, there's egg and bacon; egg sausage and bacon; egg and spam; egg bacon and spam; egg bacon sausage and spam..."
Running Crysis at 800 x 600 with the lowest quality settings, an eight-core Core i7 system managed an average frame rate of 7.36fps, compared with 5.17fps from Intel's DirectX 10 integrated graphics."
So they compared one unusable (and dirt cheap) setup to another, super-expensive and still unusable one, and then they brag about sucking 20% less?
This is typical for MS. They are mostly a software company, and there are too many people who advocate software-only solutions that make no sense, just because that's the only thing they know how to do (maybe.)
call "dee dee dee" on microsoft?
or are they off limits? like real down syndrome people and such?
bored? try this http://jadmadi.net/blog/2005/01/27/linux-wine-how-to-running-windows-viruses-with-wine/
Many server motherboards come with some chintzy onboard video, yet have plenty of CPU and RAM to throw around.
But who is going to be running D3D10.1 apps on a server? Is MS going to rewrite their GUI layers on top of their 3d API a la Apple?
This is awesome, I can finally run a game from last year at 7FPS on my brand new eight core machine that just came out a few weeks ago. Thanks MS! But wait, why not try the same thing on my 'ol 800 mhz P3 oh man does that baby have a whole new life!
Say you get a new computer with a decent CPU, but no graphics card for work. You guys remember that thing, right? Work? Spreadsheets and documents and...yeah. That stuff.
Anyway, now you can play Tomb Raider on it. The original one. Sweet.
...about the impossibility of running DirectX 10 on Windows XP.
If you can run it on software you'll be able to run it on any OS version. Gee... that was another lie from Redmond, why am I not surprised... maybe 'cause I do run he DirectX 10 hack on my XP and no it didn't raise the CPU usage (as claimed be the union of MS Windoze Vista Fanboyz)... it lowered it.
Or Alpha even ... when it comes out, they'll most likely crank up the FPS to something blistering in the neighborhood of 11 or 12 maybe....or if they're REALLY good, double it to 14 and some change!
/. is silly
they made this to run the desktop effects
not crysis xD
Just imagine the demo. "Here is the slooooow intel extreme, geez what a dog, they should be ashamed! Now check out the BRAND NEW straight out of the labs tech, this will blow your mind (cues 7fps slideshow). I know, I know, we do seriously kick butt.
To think that anybody would want to run a DX10 game on an 800mhz no SSE CPU is insane, even considering the company involved. Perhaps for DX 7,8 and perhaps 9 games this might be reasonable (though not likely) but jesus, no thanks!
"Every time Andy gives us more power, Bill takes it away".
Did we not do this already back in 1993? From the MESA project an excerpt: "August, 1993: I begin working on Mesa in my spare time. The ..."
So what is the news.
Running Crysis isn't the point of the demo. The point was that it was a DX 10 application running entirely in software. In the end, this means that systems without higher end 3D cards would be able to run Aero. THAT's the point.
They are trying to address the main complaint of the "Vista Capable" debacle. Running Crysis was just a way of demonstrating the capability.
Seriously, this is a good thing. One could compare it to Mesa 3D. You have the option of running graphics in software, if you lack the hardware to accelerate it. This is highly useful in two situations:
1) You have something intensive and need to see it on a computer that lacks the requisite accelerator. Though it won't be fast, at least you can see the output rather than just being SOL.
2) You have a non-intensive task and don't wish to purchase dedicated hardware. While Crysis crawls, I'm going to guess something like, say, Thief wouldn't.
This is just a software lawyer to allow the OS to do 3D rendering even if there's not an accelerator present. I'm sure that 99.99% of people who do 3D in any capacity will use an accelerator as they are extremely cheap and extremely high performance. However it isn't a bad thing to have a software implementation. MS has actually had one for a long time, however it only comes with the development version of DirectX. It allows you to check the expected output for a program against the reference renderer as compared to an actual card.
Sounds like this is the same thing, just sped up and packed for end user use, rather than just developers.
Could have applications in the future too. For example what will computer hardware be capable of in 15 years? Processors are likely to be much faster as compared to today. Well, this might allow for 3D to be useful when emulating Windows for old programs. People remember people emulate DOS today (see DOSBox) for various purposes. I don't think it is out of the question that a decade or two later people will emulate Windows 7. Ok however part of that will be dealing with the 3D layer. A large number of apps today make use of Direct3D. Well, if Windows 7 has a software 3D layer, and processors are blazing fast you are good. Just use that. If it doesn't you then have to make your emulator emulate the 3D hardware, since I'm guessing a decade from now the 3D subsystem will be vastly different than it is now.
This is not intended to be a "Oh you don't need a graphics card ever," thing. It is intended to give people the option to get 3D without having to have a graphics card. It won't be as good, but at least it'll work.
Have a 'server' with a decent GPU and use the magic of TCP/IP.
Performance surely couldn't suck any worse than running it locally?
If only Microsoft would open source these things... Heck if DirectX was open sourced imagine how much farther Linux would have come in the gaming arena. Yet, there is wine and that is pretty damn close to an open source version of DirectX and windows altogether now. I mean its just as buggy as native windows, sometimes even less for me. Counter-Strike: Source doesn't crash wine like it crashes XP and Vista.
Microsoft needs to fix bugs before putting in new "features"
P.S: Where can I score one of them 8-core processors, that was the most interesting part of the announcement for me.
3D accelerators are an expected feature on standard PCs. I can't think of one you can get these days without one. All the current integrated Intel and ATi and nVidia chips are 3D accelerators. Not powerful ones, but they do the trick. Any ad in card is, of course, an accelerator.
However here's a better question: How long until we don't need that anymore? Personally, I'm not thrilled with the idea of having to have lots of dedicated hardware. The whole point of a PC is a general purpose machine that can do pretty much anything because it is all programmed in software. You replace dedicated units that did only one thing with a general purpose computer that does everything. Ok well that is somewhat undermined by the requirement of specialized hardware.
Now, I understand the need for it. Graphics are intense and there is just no way, at this time, for a CPU to handle it. A dedicated processor optimized for the kind of math graphics need is the way to go. However wouldn't it be nice if that weren't the case? Wouldn't it be nice if the CPU again did everything?
We won't see that day tomorrow, but perhaps we'll see it in a decade or two.
I look back to the changes in audio production and hope to see it come to graphics as well:
Originally, PCs used in audio production were little more than interfaces for complex dedicated hardware. A normal PC simply couldn't handle it. You had a PC that was loaded full of Pro Tool cards, which were massive bunches of specialized hardware, to do anything. Well as CPUs got better, you started to be able to do more on a regular PC. At first it was still nothing really useful in the pro market. You had to do everything non-realtime, spend lots of time rendering a change then listening to it and so on. But at least you could actually do it on normal computers. Yet more time passed and now non-destructive realtime software was available on normal systems. You could overload it pretty easy, you still had to bounce tracks and such, it wasn't the unrestricted power of an accelerated solution, but it worked pretty well and in fact lots of project studios did just that.
Then we come to now. Now, the hardware accelerated audio production system is a relic. They are still made, but they are unpopular. Most professional studios don't bother, they just get a nice powerful PC (by PC I mean personal computer, Macs are included in this) with a couple of multi core processors and go to town. The CPUs easily handle large number of tracks with multiple effects and so on all in realtime. There is simply no need for dedicated hardware, and not using it means much greater flexibility. Everything is just changed in software.
So, I'd love to see that same sort of thing come to graphics. At this point, CPUs have a long way to go. But then, technology moves fast. Everything I'm talking about in the audio world has happened in about 2 decades. In just 20 years or so it went from something you could only do with amazingly expensive special hardware to something that is easy for a $1000 computer to handle.
20 years from now, may be the same deal with graphics.
Glad to see we have found a way to consume those last cycles. Bravo!
... the marketing department came up with the name - WARP - before they started creating the software, right? Now Ballmer or Ozzie can stand up on stage some point in the future and say, "... and for Windows 7 (SP2) we introduce WARP 11! Even the USS Enterprise couldn't go that fast! (..hey I bet the geeks will love us now, yeah!)
Dear God, its, like, the answer to life, the universe and everything, man!!! Way to go MS, you are the second coming of Deep thought! (sorry, couldn't resist...)
I am an ACCA student. Got a query on Accountancy/Finance? Maybe I can help!
but, couldn't run Aero. Lets see... Where did I put those "Vista Capable" stickers?
The point was that it was a DX 10 application running entirely in software. In the end, this means that systems without higher end 3D cards would be able to run Aero.
I don't get this statement at all.
Why would you need a high end graphics card to run a desktop GUI? If you're a gamer with a good graphics card, then if you're into eye candy there's no reason not to turn up the settings on Aero to "full" to get a cool looking desktop while that graphics card isn't dealing with shifting game frames.
But if you're someone who writes letters, surfs the Internet and uses whatever Windows is on the new PC you buy, why would you buy a high-end graphics card just to be able to do that?
And what about server systems? What about if, as a server admin, you just want a slim GUI to run some admin tools on but nothing more graphics intensive than that.
Personally, I slim down any GUI I use to be as fast and light as possible (whether Windows or Linux) so eye candy does nothing for me - but I get that other people like it and if they've already got the machine to cope with it then why not.
But what you're saying really doesn't make any sense (unless I'm missing something), especially when we're also being told that Windows 7 is going to be a lot more modular.
Gentoo Linux - another day, another USE flag.
So MS is doing this to avoid a "Vista ready" disaster with Windows 7?? That makes almost NO SENSE.
Windows 7 is going to be what, 3, 4, 5 year after Vista?? Even the shittiest integrated chipsets fully support Vista now, and by proxy, Windows 7.
However, this will be GREAT for future virtualization. 10 years from now, Linux with virtual Windows 7 on a thousand core computer will be able to run Aero, whoopie!
Hm two things. If this is so great, why are they waiting to incorporate it in Windows 7 - why not add it to Vista to try and regain some momentum for that pile of fail?
The other thing to note is probably that it's a decent use of all the extra idle cores on newer systems - as long as programs aren't taking advantage of multicores more than they are, why not use half the cores to do graphics processing?
Will it somehow 'stack' with dedicated GPUs?
No one else has commented that WARP 10 is impossible? Even if MS pulls off WARP 10, it'll just turn them into some weird lizard thing. Though for Ballmer that could be a good thing.
Running Crysis at 800 x 600 with the lowest quality settings, an eight-core Core i7 system managed an average frame rate of 7.36fps, compared with 5.17fps from Intel's DirectX 10 integrated graphics.
and this is ball-slapping good news?
Don't be apathetic. Procrastinate!
The point of the DX10 graphics in windows is to look cool and offload some of the processing onto the 3D card. It reminds me of putting the swap file on a ram-disk, wasting system resources to do something meant to get around having limited system resources.
That said, at least we won't see nearly as many lawsuits because of varying levels of "windows 7" compatibility.
The core problem with Microsoft is that it has absolutely no concept of competition or how to work with other companies in partnership.
I work for a US-owned telecoms company that is already well established in business PBX, call-centres, Voice-over-IP and voice messaging.
Last week, we had a team meeting and one of my fellow consultants gave us a quick overview of Microsoft's Office Communication Server. To cut a long story short, rather than embracing the strengths of their own corporate desktop presence and working *with* telecoms vendors like us to integrate with our systems, they're actually going all out to lock us out with proprietary codecs (for VoIP stream encoding & decoding) rather than using open codecs that already do the job perfectly well.
The problem is that Microsoft is trying to control far too many new markets rather than only focusing on what it does well - this means that it's spreading itself far too thin when it's trying to take on the already big players in those markets; Google is a classic example of this.
I don't see the logic behind it at all - look at the Internet in 2008 and compare it to, say, 1998, and the most popular and liked applications and protocols are those where the creators have embraced and used open standards (okay, with the exception of iTunes and AAC formats maybe).
I don't get it with Microsoft at all...
Gentoo Linux - another day, another USE flag.
When I think of WARP I still think of OS/2 Warp. Seems fitting considering the reaction I'm seeing to this news.
Because, quite frankly, people were upset that their 'Vista Capable' computers couldn't run Vista with Aero enabled. The integrated cards don't have the 'oomph' for Aero's glassy transparency effects, but Microsoft had tooted the horn of 'Look! Shiny!' loud and long, so people expected that functionality. In addition, there are other places extended graphics capabilities are used (the Vista DVD maker program, for instance), where if your card isn't up to snuff, you can't use those programs.
By showing 'we can make this work in software, slowly, but work,' they're trying to address that. This isn't for gaming, despite the demo. This is an attempt to solve the problem out of the gate in Windows 7 so that they don't have another Vista Capable type class action suit.
--Rachel
The bad news is that they were rendering a black cube on a black background. Color and lighting are expected for the new version, at lower fps.
I already read about this in a different news mag - and the main purpose of this thing is FOR DEVELOPERS to test the rendering of their stuff on cheap, low-end PCs (which are often used for development)
The MAFIAA is a bunch of mindless jerks who will be the first up against the wall when the revolution comes
Hurrah! In the future, when i switch off pointless Aero crap, it will free up lots more cpu cycles for the annoying microsoft apps i need to run to see simple 2d spreadsheet data sent to me by retards who use proprietary microsoft file formats. Microsoft FTW!!
They whose government reduces their essential liberties for temporary security, receive neither liberty nor security.
so after removing the software renderer from DirectX around ver7/8, they now plan to put it back?
woooo...way to go guys..your back to where you where last century...ROFLMAO
this is yet another miss quoted summery from someone who is just trying to slam microsoft... what it actually says in TFA is that DX10 in windows 7 CAN run on the gpu OR the cpu alone, but, in most instances, will use both together to get the maximum effect required.
portfolio
So there's still a geek or two left at M$, as it seems.
Aside from the cool factor, what exactly is the purpose of this hack? Nobody wants to play Crysis at 7fps in the real world, and dedicated 3D hardware is moving into even the smallest devices. 10 years ago, when notebooks didn't have 3D cards, this would've been commercially interesting. In 2008, it's a simple "because we can" hack.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
Seems mighty useful on an 80 core X86 coprocessor..
Maybe 560 fps would be overkill, but:
140 fps at 1600x1200
35 FPS at 3200*2400
And Win 7 will supposedly ship next year, but with schedule slip, etc.
Lets figure 2010. About the time for larrabee..
The law is a weapon of the government, not a protection for the likes of you. Surely you understand that.
Improving performance over a dedicated graphics chip (albeit a weak one) is still a respectable achievement, especially when you consider games typically use ~100% cpu anyway. Whilst it may be unplayable for crysis, I can see it giving a solid frame rate on things like WoW.
This is a huge step in the right direction. Keep in mind that win7 supports up to 256 cores. By the time we have that many, we wont need video cards any more.
:D
In 10 years, gamers will tout their specs by saying "Oh yeah, well I get 200 fps on wow4 with my Intel c256 8g. Suck on that!"<br>
If I held stock in Nvidia id sell it now.
You do realise that Microsoft has been about control from the beginning right? The Microsoft master plan is total domination over everything computer related.
Intel does real time ray tracing on an eight core machine.
http://blogs.intel.com/research/2007/10/real_time_raytracing_the_end_o.php
No sig today...
They're not going to cater the very small group of high-end PC gamers. Modify the kernel to satisfy the wishes of 1% of all Windows users? Not worth it.
"an eight-core Core i7 system managed an average frame rate of 7.36fps, compared with 5.17fps from Intel's DirectX 10 integrated graphics"
So a $5 single cheap chip runs crysis slower than an 8-core $1000 200W behemoth CPU?
Wow. Cheap affordable 3D is here!!!
FFS.
but will it run Crysis?
"If this is a case, then the 3D hardware revolution sparked by 3dfx in
1997 will prove to only be a 10-year hiatus from the natural evolution
of CPU-driven rendering."
http://arstechnica.com/articles/paedia/gpu-sweeney-interview.ars
In the end, this means that systems without higher end 3D cards would be able to run Aero. THAT's the point.
Then it's pointless. Bottom-of-the-line 3D cards have been capable of running Aero for years. Any system with enough CPU grunt to emulate DX10, will have a video card in it that can run Aero.
To fsck over Linux?
"Novel method for rasterizing three dimensional scenes in absence of specific hardware support."
/Mike
-- "So, what's the deal with Auntie Gerschwitz et all?"
You know, it would have been possible to make aero not use 3d in case there is no acceleration available, now you have UI that requires 4 cores and will still be slow, great compatibility!
Copyright infringement is "piracy" in the same way DRM is "consumer rape"
Seriously, if the coding quality is the same as with Microsoft's MPEG4 decoder, we can expect alternative software 3D engines to get _way_ faster.
Which is why you will never see warp 10. Obviously no-one at Microsoft has seen Star Trek otherwise they would already know this is impossible. Or perhaps they are trying to tell us something
My ism, it's full of beliefs.
so, would I be able to play DX10 game on my DX9 card? It should do things GPU is not able to do on CPU, right?
How some people have managed, without access to the build source and tools, to get DX 10 working on XP?
If they have to backport kernel mods and all that sort of crap to the extent of being unable to do it with free and complete access to the build process of XP and access to the people who wrote it, how did a bunch of people without these resources manage???
Possibly because that argument is a load of bullshit
PS Why is MS so cock-a-whoop about this? Why, even more strangely, are people on /. who should know better so impressed. Ever heard of Mesa? Software rendered. DX has a software render mode. Hell, DX5 (IIRC) is now ONLY handled in software because the API calls for DX5 are available in the DX8+ driver system.
It was ALWAYS possible to run DX is software. So why the big song and dance here and now? That they've finally decided to put a software render call for ALL API calls for DX10 in the driver?
PS Why is the label on how long you've waited gone? This post has waited 20 minutes about and still demands that I wait because /. doesn't like quick posting.
about two years ago i wrote a simple DirectX MMORPG. One of the main problems was that some computers where I had to test it didn't have compatible acceleration cars.
For those computers I used software rendering vs. hardware rendering. That's alreay present on DirectX, has it been sped up?
In the end I suspect this means they'll be putting GPU support cores directly on the die with CPU cores.
:T:R:A:N:S:
Sure, just imagine Vista running on a 800MHz computer with software render.
As stupid as the idea might sound at first, what if in say.. ten or twenty years people come up with new kind of CPUs.. so powerful that specific one-task-optimized hardware won't be necessary anymore ?
I know that tendency is to move to hardware to have it faster, but what if, quantum computers become real (or any new type of technology), and assuming they gonna be hell of a fast machines... wouldn't be it faster, easier and cheaper to just write software then to do the research, development, design, production etc... all that involves creating hardware....?
-- All Gods were immortal.
-- S. Lem
IBM vindicated!
If DX10 will be handled in the CPU, what effect will this have on Linux in general?
Ah, the cycle of PC hardware. Starts out with nothing but the bear minimum generalized equipment where the cpu itself is timing the scan rate for the display. Then slowly explodes to the Amigia point where there is a separate chip for everything under the sun. After that everything gets pulled back in again. PCs have been on their balloon out for a while, it started with sound cards, then fancy video cards, then all kinds of expansion buses. Now we are headed back for just one big honkin CPU in charge of everything again.
Repeal the 17th Amendment TODAY! Also Please Read http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.html
The news here is not the existence of a software renderer, but one with good performance (such that a high-end CPU is competitive with a low-end GPU for some tasks). I wonder how the trusty Mesa GL renderer compares to Microsoft's latest offering? (They implement different APIs, but Wine provides DirectX 10 on top of OpenGL, so you can get an apples to apples comparison.)
-- Ed Avis ed@membled.com
Yeah Microsoft's going to start working with IBM again! Oh wait... This should refresh some memories Seriously Engadget got the Irony before /. whats wrong here?
Common Sense
There, fixed it for you.
Change is certain; progress is not obligatory.
Microsoft promise a lot of things. Let's see if this feature is still there once Windows 7 is out and about.
Anyway, if you're serious about 3D, you're going to get a dedicated 3D card, or at least a decent integrated one. That doesn't mean what they are doing is a bad idea. It is actually a *splendid* idea. Good on them. The reason I say this is that if a particular feature is lacking on the card you have, you can always fall back to software to use it anyway. Sure, performance won't be great, but you can still use it. This is particularly important if using such a feature is the *only* option- it lets you use software you otherwise could not. It also makes development much easier- you can target a particular feature, knowing that everyone will have it, via the software renderer in the worst case. I certainly hope it is available for hardware renderers to selectively fall back on if they lack a certain feature, but I suspect it'll just be a full software solution.
(it's a bit late here, please forgive any mistakes in the above)
sny star trek fan knows that at warp 10 you can do time travels, enabling the CPU to process all the frames at the same time. any doubts, see star trek 4
With technologies such as CUDA shouldn't they be putting DirectX fully onto the graphics card?
Even better would be to have a dedicated "API" card that is loaded with an API and that could then do the processing.
OpenGL please
IBM owns OS2 WARP, so I hope they sue M$
I doubt big multicore chips will be cheap enough for the Xbox 3, but win7 probably won't be released in time for it anyway.
This isn't for Aero on GMAs. This is so you can target both Xbox4 and Win7/GFW without even bothering to think.
One set-top box, one platform. They've had a hard-on for it for a decade+, it's coming.
--- Do you believe in the day?
I mean, really, both Mac and Linux have software OpenGL so the video card acts as an accelerator... your software is faster with a good video card but you could get all the Quartz effects even on a Powermac 7500, and you can get T&L even on the horrible GMA 950. Sure, it takes up a whole core and makes the system slower than a G4 with a Radeon 9200, but it works.
I had no idea that Microsoft had completely passed the whole job of 3d graphics off on the video card makers.
Why would you need a high end graphics card to run a desktop GUI?
I don't know if it's part of Aero, but there's a good paper by some MS Research guys about rendering text with pixel shaders (you may be surprised to learn that rendering text is one of the most CPU-intensive things in a modern GUI). In a truetype font, every glyph is stored as a sequence of bezier curves. You can approximate these by drawing two triangles each with the endoints and one of the control points as its vertexes. The pixel shader then removes the errors in this approximation, giving you antialiased text, at any size, with just a small triangle list needing to be stored in RAM for each glyph (rather than a bitmap at each resolution, which is how Quartz and, I think X, does it). This frees up a lot of CPU time and uses less power (since the GPU is optimised for this kind of algorithm).
There are lots of other things better handled by a GPU than a CPU in a modern desktop, such as compositing the windows together and compositing bitmaps and video within the windows.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
The hard part of using parallel hardware to parallel process is that the parallel jobs rarely line up in simple patterns like the simple configuration of the hardware, which makes it hard to specify in software how to parallelize the jobs on the hardware.
But graphics processing is an exception. Graphics is an obviously parallel job to the rest of the application, with occasional messaging between the two overall jobs between epic bouts of specialized processing within each job. That's why HW graphics acceleration is so successful in exploiting the extra HW, without slowing the main processor to support that basic parallel model.
I worked with a company almost 20 years ago that built parallel (DSP/FPGA) graphics hardware for a hires (16Mpxl/40bit) digital camera, that grew from the team's previous company that made a dual-processor graphics workstation. One 68040 ran the OS and apps, another 68040 ran the graphics, tied together on a proprietary bus (with another bus behind the graphics CPU to the analog display HW). Splitting the graphics at an API across multiple processors is a very good upfront guess at all the different configurations of demand on the HW for different parallelizable tasks.
Processing graphics on a separate core is tempting, because the multiple cores have such high bandwidth / low latency on the same chip. But the other cores are not tailored explicitly for graphics, so aren't as internally performant as are GPUs. Putting a GPU core on an x86 chip would be a win. But another win would be moving the higher level graphics software to the separate x86 core, but leaving the product of that processing mid-level instructions and data for the separate GPU. That 3 part structure would be fairly easy and generic to program, since the processing falls into those neat categories. And because the computing load of each stage is roughly proportional to the power of each core.
What would probably work best would be Windows running DirectX on a separate x86 core from applications and OS, with a bus directly from that core to a separate GPU (PCI-e is probably fine, given enough lanes). Architecting the OS to run on its own core, and applications on their own core(s), probably maps the software to the hardware well generically, then let the mapping overlap when there are fewer cores.
If Windows doesn't do that, Linux still can (you can do it yourself - it's Open Source :). If Windows does split DirectX to a separate core across an API, then perhaps Linux could still get that package running itself. Maybe Microsoft could make some money licensing DirectX binaries with an open API to game (and pro visualization) companies which run Linux, if Microsoft will accept yet another crack in its Windows monopoly. If not, then Linux will split graphics to a separate core, and run circles (triangles, really :) around Windows. One way or another this architecture is a successful way to compete in the increasingly common (even default) environment of multiple cores.
--
make install -not war
Hahaha, good ole days...
Microsoft has introduced a 'fully conformant software rasterizer' called WARP (Windows Advanced Rasterization Platform) 10
Sheesh, trust Microsoft to forget that Warp 10 is impossible to achieve.
Or, like their headquarters being located at "One Microsoft Way," is this a subtle message about trying to oversee and control everything, since at warp 10 it's "technically occupying all places in the universe at the same time?"
Exactly how delusional are you to believe that a piece of software can't be ran on another OS just because some company says that it can't? Have you never heard of Wine? Emulators? Virtual machines?
The fact that the Wine crew have already reverse engineered part of DX10 and have it running over OpenGL should make it exceptionally obvious that there is no concern that DX10 has that cannot be performed by some other abstraction beneath it. DX10 is not a kernel, it's not it's own operating system. And even if it were, we could sneak another piece of software under it *still* and have it running on other hardware.
Microsoft's chief argument for DX10 was some bullshit argument about missing features in hardware. Guess what? They just wrote a damned software rasterizer, which does the exact same damned thing that they said wasn't possible for XP. The argument is dead.
When you wake up from your delusional coma, maybe you'll understand that.
I will be able to play Halo 2!
This is a useful feature, especially for people with laptops. Dedicated graphics cards are large, run very hot, and draw a ton of power.
Today's integrated chipsets are not nearly where they need to be to handle even simple 3d stuff.
I have a friend who's considering buying a new laptop because he bought one with integrated graphics a year ago. More recently he started to do some 3d work and has found his integrated graphics card completely unable to cope with even simple stuff. He would love to have something like this right now.
MS has said they're aiming to get Windows 7 down to running on more embedded/smaller platforms. That's what this is really about.
Intel is going to release even more efficient atom processors and they'll probably also get some of the design benefits from Larrabee. Stick some wider SIMD units on Atom, hey presto, embedded system on a chip and MS is already most of the way there to supporting it.
Combine it with dense flash storage and the new battery technologies on the way... Suddenly have some very compelling compact devices running Windows 7. And here I was thinking MS was hypersensitive to picking up MS's plotting.
Running Crysis at 800 x 600 with the lowest quality settings, an eight-core Core i7 system managed an average frame rate of 7.36fps, compared with 5.17fps from Intel's DirectX 10 integrated graphics.
This is easy to laugh at (and many Slashdotters have done so above) but this move shows Microsoft is seriously looking at the future, and not in a "we need a new Windows that'll actually make some money" kinda way.
Running an 8 core machine just to do CPU based graphics rendering is currently impractical and stupid. But in 5 or 10 years? 8->64 core machines will probably the norm and we'll have more CPU power than we know what to do with (we already do for most users in terms of general processing), so there'll be room for this concept.
The day of many separate pieces of hardware is going to be up sometime in the future, and this is a great step at planning for it. Once you have, say, 100 cores, why not devote a handful to graphics, one to networking, one to IO control.. and effectively have "software as hardware"? Why have a dedicated graphics card *if* the CPU power, technology and bandwidth is there to deal with it in future? At least MS are thinking about something that could be useful 5 years down the line..
The biggest benefit would seem to be keeping the GPU turned off during general work with a 3D operating system.
this will lead the way to put better acceleration on the CPU, like the AMD fusion will!!!!
I wonder how long it took them to do this...
... Maybe I stand corrected?
I also wonder how long it would take them to make DX10 work in Windows XP, which I'm sure would have had a much greater impact.
I dualboot Vista and XP on my desktop and I use Vista solely for gaming with DirectX 10. I would loveeee to use XP for everything and not have both OS's at the same time.
I guess that's probably too much to ask. Oh wait. Apparently Microsoft has an Alpha for DX10 on XP...
If you were offended by anything I said... No, I'm not sorry. Please lighten up.
Could Microsoft be trying to extricate itself from the relationships it has with hardware vendors? I read a quote a couple years ago from a Microsoft engineer that said something to the effect of, "Microsoft could make their OS a ton faster on older hardware, but because of relationships with hardware manufacturers like Intel, HP and Dell, they can't."
(I don't recall the source, so I'm relying on the /. collective to remember or set me straight)
If Microsoft is free to make the best OS they possibly can, where does that leave the hardware manufacturers? If the demand for new hardware diminishes because the new OS runs as well or better on your existing hardware, what will happen?
The enthusiast markets will still need to purchase high-end hardware, although we might see an increase in price on the high-end items.
Now, if Microsoft is left to make the best OS they can, there's no guarantee they will. OEM sales are where they make the most of their OS sales (I'm assuming), but if they can market a bigger, better, faster product, I think they'll see a lot more upgrade sales.
I have a friend who's considering buying a new laptop because he bought one with integrated graphics a year ago. More recently he started to do some 3d work and has found his integrated graphics card completely unable to cope with even simple stuff. He would love to have something like this right now.
Nod.
I've been thinking that I should have gotten a plain Macbook instead of my Macbook Pro, because my Pro runs so hot... and OS X already has this capability: the main difference between running 3d on my G4 Mac Mini with a Radeon 9200 and the Intel Mac mini with an Intel GMA950 is that for some things the Intel is faster and for some things the G4 is faster... they both have pretty much the same OpenGL functionality.
With regards to Windows, it's safe to say that many apps out there, with the exception of some higher-end games, don't use modern CPUs to their full potential. Just because Windows acknowledges their presence doesn't mean they're being put to good use. Some will be quick to ask why an office suite (for example) needs multi-core support. My answer is why not!? You forked over the extra cash for the dual-core processor and it would be nice if it was actually put to good use.
Running what amounts to a virtual 3D-adapter in software is nothing new of course. Whether it will be done properly is another story. Will the performance ever catch up-to the likes of the GeForce 9800 GTX?? Highly unlikely because of it will cause a great deal of strain between the graphics card market and OS vendors like Microsoft. For the VM world, it would be great as Linux users could FINALLY run Windows-based games in a VM without the need to mess with dual-booting. Not to mention Live CDs could finally run Compiz! It would definitely be a paradigm shift as it would help steer more users towards Linux.
Now THAT would be the year of Linux on the Desktop(tm). Dreaming is still free right?
I find it disturbing that you would so quickly call someone a liar when you are clearly ignorant of the subject you speak of. I find it even more distributing that you were modded up as a result.
Yeah, this is just MS ripping off the cutting edge work done by Lunix.
Oh, wait...
Choose your "experts" carefully.
I'll take an expert over a pay-for-say MS "expert" any day. Facts happen to run against MS, get over it. That's why the marketing firms they hire come down so hard on reviewers, evaluators and benchmarkers.
If you want to get down to the bottom of some of the many, many problems with MS Vista, as well as the OpenGL imitation, then see Peter Gutmann's analysis, A Cost Analysis of Windows Vista Content Protection.
Running a smear campaign may or may not annoy the author, but it is the facts he is reporting. You can even read Peter's response to the MS attack dogs where he addresses their tactics as well as emphasizes some of the points they chose to skip over.
MS has a long history of manufacturing abuse of not just critics but also critical data. Money spend on MS products goes into funding unethical, anti-competitive, and, in some cases, illegal activity. Even helping keep the monopoly going, whether intentionally or unintentionally, by not supporting open formats or protocols allows the malfeasance continued funding.
Beta is broken and the link to classic doesn't work. Stop wasting our time or there won't be anybody left here.
We asked for compatibility to take a back seat to security, and they did it. The end result is Vista. It's best features are either invisible, or downright irritating. It doesn't run a lot of old software. Patches occasionally break things. This is what we said we wanted, and it sucks.
If the software rasterizer is faster in newer games, how about older games? I've always been a fan of software rendering engines. Not because they're necessarily better, just because I think they're neat.
Anyhow, what about Half-Life 1 games (Counter-Strike for example), or Quake 3 engine games, and so on? If they run faster in software mode, then there's some utility here; they'll run fast enough to be playable, and will run better in software than hardware.
equal computers one with a cuda enable version of this warp 10 and a one of those nvidia tesla c1060 cards versus one with directx 10 and a nvidia gtx 280 (the graphics card which the c1060 is supposedly based on). of course this would effectively be a comparison of a $1200 video card vs. $500-$600 video card, but it would be interesting to see.
lose != loose
After the Spore debacle (and the soon GTA debacle) you're going to need more CPU for the DRM than the graphics...
I wonder if MS is taking a stab at stream processing, which is a threat to Intel. Since obviously this is step towards enabling rendering on Larrabe, which is essentially a great big multi-core x86 CPU in a GPUs clothing. Little code change would be needed to get a full DX10 render path running on a larrabe chip. Since vendors are not going to stop putting under powered GPUs in laptops and mainstream desktops, it makes sense to meet all needs in the middle. AMD want's to put a GPU and CPU on the same die, fine, but Intel + Microsoft are obviously gearing up for one general purpose many-core CPU to do all things.
After logging in slashdot still does not take you back to the page you were on. It's been that way for 20 years.
I'm really getting bored of meaningless statistics such as "my software renderer is better then your software renderer because it can run Far Cry at a FPS of 6 rather than 5", which forget the essentials: when it comes to playability 6 IS NO BETTER THAN 5! In fact, 7 is not better than 5, nor is 10, nor is 15. Starting from 20 FPS this might be somewhat meaningful! Please refrain from cluttering teh Interweb with more meaningless statistics Have a nice day, The Spaghetti Monster
I used to play Weapons Factory for Quake 2 on software rendering and "56K" modem (if you can call it that). I could snipe with 200-300 ping. Now get off my lawn LPBs!!!
there is only a 4 core i7...with hyperthreading enabled, which should give 8 threads.
Am I the only one to see a relation to Star Trek? The picture tag features Bill Gates as a borg. And borg had Transwarp, which was like Warp ten.
C'mon people this is /. so connect the dots! Its gotta be a joke.
the brain-dead architecture of the x86 PC strikes me as funny.
Here, you've got 2, 4, what - now 8 cores which can't compete with a decent FPGA?! The problem isn't the CPU speed. The problem is that CPUs make very poor DSPs. A TI DSP can encode/decode HD video in realtime using only a few percent of the power required by the desktop CPU. A large part of that GPU's performance comes from the fact that it has hardware optimized for video, which, of course, Intel has steadfastly refused to add to their processors. Instead, they push multimedia instructions which, as hard as they try, are still hamstrung by the memory architecture, and hence, non-competitive compared to a GPU.
What we really need is for PC architecture to include a standard FPGA which can be reprogrammed on the fly by the OS. You need a GPU? Simply program the FPGA for 3D tasks (you need not emulate the entire GPU - just the parts you need at the moment for your application). You want to do audio processing? Filter implementation in the FPGA is as simple as loading the correct software. Instead of writing the algorithm in software, and it being implemented by software, you configure the hardware to do the computations you need directly. That way, you get the flexibility of software with the speed of dedicated hardware.
But, alas, market forces trump all others. I remember seeing $20 motherboards recently!? When even a Spartan FPGA costs $10 in quantity, I'm not going to hold my breath for a standard FPGA. But it sure would be nice.
The society for a thought-free internet welcomes you.
Back in the olden days applications used to perform some sort of benchmark on the hardware they were running on and simply advise you, self-degrade, or just plain refuse to run if your machine can't handle it. I find the software-only rendering option to be an interesting one, but as someone else pointed out, am unclear on how this is a major advancement over OpenGL. Then again, I won't touch Vista with a 10' pole, so I may never know.
The quad core2 cpus are about twice that. The new i7 also peaks at ~130W. Intel is back down to where they were with pentium3; around 35W per core.
The reality is that power usage/processing performance (for every manufacturer of processors) generally improves every year and it is software reliance on cpu performance that increases your electricity bill.
"The Adobe Updater must update itself before it can check for updates. Would you like to update the Adobe Updater now?"
They ended up paying them after going to court and such.
It's almost hard to believe MSFT is still in the OS business given the history of their OS products and how bad they are at it.
Now they're running 3D graphics on the CPU. How 1987 of them.
-Matt
I've tried to install Apple's Mac OS X on a PC. And even drivers for my GPU was not found, I can see many of Mac OS desktop effects. Minimizing windows, dialog box effects, expo - all runs smoothly without GPU acceleration. May be some thing like this is Microsoft's point.
Headline: Microsoft invents what the open source world has had for years.
Great innovation, Microsoft!
I want my Cowboyneal
The CPU in question is a four core CPU that can do eight threads in hardware. To have eight cores you'd need two CPUs.
This thing isn't meant to run the latest whiz-bang games like Crysis -- They only demoed it with Crysis because its a high-profile benchmark that probably exercises the capabilities of Direct3D 10 pretty fully.
This is aimed at accelerating Aero and casual games like your girlfriend or mom plays. They want to push Direct3D 10 in this casual games space, which currently tends to target older versions of Direct3D, which Intel's integrated graphics has an easier time coping with. Its basically a free Direct3D 10 graphics card for all PCs, making the Direct3D 10 feature set the new baseline, even if performance is a fraction of dedicated cards, because it will still perform well enough for many casual games -- remember that casual and web games are the fastest growing sector of the games industry, and that women over 35 is already a signifigant and fast-growing demographic.
MS Intellectual Property
Engineering is the art of compromise.
First, look at the MSDN article: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd285359.aspx unless it's against your religion to do so. Microsoft is touting Warp as a software fallback where the PC hardware is not up to the job. Well done to the ~5 posters who have seen this, your score a +10 on the scale of comprehending the MSDN article. -10 to Linix/Mac fanboys for seeing the word Microsoft, frothing at the mouth. A software fallback makes perfect sense on several fronts: 1. Older software that uses GDI/GDI+ gets a performance increase on Windows 7. GDI/GDI+ performance got walloped with Vista. Try running some VBA in Excel that builds graphs for example. Stupid new diver model and crap implementation from device manufactures. 2. Direct 3D games. The article mentions device CAPS, that's capabilities if I recall. Game coders have to examine what the device (graphics card) is capable of doing before trying to do it. EG: If its ATI and it's model X do routine Y, otherwise do Z. The code should just run in software emulation. It will be easier for developers to at least run the code without it crashing and identify where the fallback to software is. They are then free to develop a better workaround without having crash dumps to understand. EG quicker game development. 3. And in my opinion, most important. The GUI, Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) was introduced with Vista and on XP. While I think it's next to impossible to truly describe the potential impact of this, I'll have a go. a. It's vector based. Resolution and device independent graphics for example. Coordinates are double precision, if someone makes a massive monitor or a monitor with 600 pixels per inch capability, WPF will still cope without the display looking crap. b. Floating point precision colour. Put this in perspective, most colour values are byte based. One byte for red, another for blue, another for green and one more for alpha or opacity (transparency). A byte = 256 values. Ignoring the alpha channel, that's 256x256x256 colours, or 16,777,216 colours. A single (32bit) can be positive or negative in value, so lets be conservative and only use positive values; that's 3.402823e38 or 340,282,300,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000. Now multiply that by 3 for red, green and blue and you get: 120,846,900,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000. That should be enough colours to be getting on with. I imagine that display technology will take a while to catch up with a figure like that. c. 3D. Developers can use 3D in their applications without an intimate knowledge of how the Direct 3D API works. d. Recently, .net 3.5 SP1 introduced the ability for programmers to use shaders as well. It's early days yet; so useful implementations are bit thin on the ground. But you can introduce motion blur when a user is scrolling through a list of photos for example.
All of this stuff does not come cheep, so MS are offloading as much as they can onto the GPU. But if the GPU fails for some reason, they don't want GUI developers trying to understand why and code round the problem. Warp enables them to at least have the app run, regardless of hardware. They are then free to either fix the problem or up the hardware limits.
This technology has bugger all to do with playing Crysis, it's used as an example for gods sake.
What? That you can get better performance in software on an 8-core system, than with integrated graphics? So how many real systems will this help run Aero? I suspect most 8-core systems being sold will have sufficient graphics capabilities, and the ones with the shitty integrated graphics will probably still be better off with integrated graphics than software rendering.
I don't think this is for running Aero on machines with under-performing integrated graphics, and that isn't what Microsoft say it is for. I don't quite understand what the purpose of this is, but according to the MSDN page on it
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.