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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."
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.
As I said in another post:
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.
The direct link to their numbers is here, including number for quad and dual CPUs. And here is the inquirer's take on it, which I tend to agree. This is about making sure that Win7 is put on as many machines as possible and doesn't have a "Vista Capable" debacle out of the gate. With this tech as long as they don't fuck up the CPU specs like they did with Vista(A 1GHz with 512Mb of RAM for Basic and 1Gb for all the others? WTF?) they should be able to give the Aero "experience" no matter how shitty of an Intel integrated GPU comes with your laptop. Of course it'll run so damned slow that the desktop will be pretty much the only thing you CAN run, but there won't be any more lawsuits because the machines can't run features. Anyway that is what I'm betting is going on in the mind of MSFT.
Personally I'll just be happy if Win7 doesn't run like a damned slug. because I'm really getting tired of playing "find a working driver" for all those damned laptops that keep getting dumped on my desk to be "downgraded" from Vista. I shudder to think how all those Best Buy and Wal Mart sub $600 laptops would have run if Vista would have had this "feature" at launch. How about making a nice lean functional OS instead of trying to out pretty Apple MSFT? Because frankly when you try to do Apple pretty you just end up sucking the big wet titty. Just accept the fact that you suck at pretty and move on. Win2K and WinXP weren't pretty and look at how much cash you made. Those of us that work with Windows will take compatibility and speed over pretty any day of the week. Just beg Allchin to come back and make backwards compatibility job #1 again and you'll find your customers will be happy.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
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
Well... then they better try again. It still sounds like a complete failure to me. Since the integrated graphics is equivalent, there is no advantage, and no resolution to the problem. What exactly are you try to get at?
Except the integrated graphics on a bunch of 'Vista Capable' laptops DON'T do DirectX10 or Aero... but if a patch to Vista (or Windows 7) will get Aero working on directX10 on the CPU... a buttload of PCs that CAN'T currently do Aero, now CAN.
I'm sorry, but Peter Gutmann is not a reputable source for accurate information on Vista graphics, or anything related to Vista at all. Several of his claims have been widely proven to be exaggerated or downright false, and when asked to provide proof, he has refused. His claims have been picked apart on numerous sites both directly and indirectly through the sourcing of benchmarks.
I suggest you read these articles for instance, which provide a good overview:
http://blogs.zdnet.com/Ou/?p=673
http://blogs.zdnet.com/Ou/?p=718
Some of his points are admittedly valid, there are genuine flaws in the new graphics driver device spec., but he's clearly most concerned with pushing an anti-Vista agenda, even if that requires resorting to FUD.
Choose your "experts" carefully.
I presume you're referring to the article in which he described Vista as something like "quite possibly the longest suicide note in history"? I read it back in 06 shortly after it was initially published, I didn't know Gutmann's work terribly well before reading that, but he came highly recommended.
However, that article cost him about 98% credibility with me. Some of it - even some of the really bad stuff - might in fact be true. However, there were trivially verfiable claims he made which were blatantly untrue (an example being that ATI, nVidia, and other graphics companies were going to need to switch away from unified drivers, and provide a different driver for each card model - which by the time the article went public was an obvious falsehood since you could download and install the beta Vista drivers for any card in a given family and they would work fine).
If the man can't be bothered to do even that minimal an amount of research (it also didn't help that he refused to disclose any of his sources) then he has no business publishing in anything but tabloids, nor does he have any place in academic circles. I am a student, not a professor, but if I had written such tripe and submitted it to anybody who knew what I was talking about, I'd have been laughed out of the department.
Incidentally, the article has been edited at leas three times since its initial publication. While I have no objection to revising, it is usually done prior to publication, not afterwards. Furthermore, while some of the more blatantly false claims are missing from the latest version, Gutmann neither addresses nor explicitly retracts those statements. It is although he wishes to remove the original statements entirely, though nothing controversial on the Internet ever vanishes so thoroughly as that.
There's no place I could be, since I've found Serenity...
No, those soundcards aren't anything more than that. They just get the signal and convert it for the computer. I've owned a few, and worked with many more. Thus far I haven't seen any that do anything past conversion, routing, and perhaps basic mixing (basically those that have more advanced routing). Their function is to convert the sound to a format the PC can use and hand it off, nothing more. That they are external has nothing to do with it. That is done for convenience (hard to pack a lot of inputs on a PCI card) and noise (don't need to worry about dealing with all the RF from the computer). Firewire is often used since it has DMA and thus works well for low latency sound, but there's others that use their own PCI card and interface (MOTU does both, for example).
Now I leave open the possibility there are ones I haven't encountered that do something more, but those I've seen are just soundcards.
You forget that timing isn't an issue on the computer. Everything on there is asynchronous, clockless. The audio is just a stream of bits on disk. The computer never processes it at the sample rate, that is just a number stored in the file. So soundcards don't do anything special in this regard other than have a good clock to which everything is slaved (or perhaps a word clock input for external clocking). Once the audio has been converted and handed off to the system, timing isn't an issue anymore. The only difference between a cheap consumer card and an expensive pro card in this regard is the quality of timing source, and perhaps if everything is locked to a single source.
In fact, you'll find that there is often more processing done on consumer cards, than on pro cards. Pro cards just convert the signal from analogue or S/PDIF or whatever and feed it in to the computer. Consumer cards often do sample rate conversion, and sometimes various other kinds of processing. In fact the card with the most muscle I'm aware of (leaving out dedicated hardware like the HDAccel) is the SoundBlaster X-Fi. That can handle 128 different sound sources in hardware, do SRC on all of them, place them in space, and perform effects on them. Compare that to a MOTU HD192 which does little more than deal with audio input and output, and mix/route it as you specify.
The money/hardware in pro cards is in high quality circuitry, mostly in the analogue phase, not any special processing.
Windows 95 didn't invent disk compression. Stacker and Doublespace were some products that did the same thing for DOS.
"Not to mention all the idiots who use words like boxen."
Anonymous Coward on Monday August 04, @06:49PM
And in fact, DOS 6 also had disk compression. You could even see that they had illegally copied Stackers code because they forgot to take out Stackers copyright notice.
Enter Arch Linux. Installed to a CLI in about 10 minutes. Getting the wi-fi working from the cli with wpa_supplicant and the zd1211 firmware for my card was a breeze. Then I proceeded to download and install xorg and icewm. All told, at a cli with wi-fi working it idles at eleven MB. Logged in to icewm it sits at 17. And with firefox running, a grand total of 51 Megabytes. And of course, it's blazing. With Firefox 2, it's at least as fast as my Pentium 4 laptop running Debian with Firefox 3. And, of course everything works in Firefox. Flash 10, etc.
Although what I've said doesn't speak completely to your point, suffice it to say, depending on your setup, you aren't doomed to a slower computer when running reasonably up to date software.
The soylentnews experiment has been a dismal failure.
At the time that DOS 6.0 came out, and the Stacker copyright was still in the code, MS had NOT licensed anything from Stac Electronics. They did not buy the software. They did illegally copy it. So, no joke, AND not uninformed.