Now the real question; How many "service packs" will it take to get it to work properly?

The condition being you'll need an Intel Havendale CPU with integrated GPU. Ha Ha, joking.

its pretty sad that their CPU beat their graphics chips at what a GPU should do. and whats sadder is that a Geforce 8400 is 5x faster than their CPU which beat their IGP's at graphics. what does that say about their IGP's?
(basing my reply on the numbers posted on the techreport article)

"Systems built to take advantage of WARP from a hardware standpoint will be able to display graphics even when the video card is missing—or toasted. So if you’ve nuked your graphics card from a bad BIOS flash, fear not on a WARP-capable system. At least you will be able to boot back up until the video card is replaced."

That, from a massive enterprise point of view (28000 users / 46000 desktops & laptops) is a very nice feature. We have to deal with blown video cards monthly, and when it happens we're either waiting for warranty vendor to come & replace (a few hours) or scrambling to find an older one from an old clunker... either scenarios mean the user isn't able to work.

Definitely looking forward to WARP

DX has always had a hardware emulation mode (run in software on the CPU). It allows a programmer to test without concern of what DX capabilities the GPU he/she is testing with is capable of.

So, MS is going to tout this as a feature of Windows 7, eh?

wait a sec, basically, from i can see on that chart, getting a single, not so great (anymore), GPU like the 8800 GTS, and playing crysis using this warp thing, you get an average FPS higher than three 280 gtx's or 2 4870 x2's?

i don't know or care about the running games using your cpu alone, but cranking up 3d performance this much? hmmmm.. first i hope it works cause high-end gaming can become so much cheaper, second, it'll be interesting to see where games can go from there because of this..since consumers will be able to buy mid-to-low end graphics cards and still be able to play games.. game creators can start cranking up the graphics alot.. also, the biggest problem with pc gaming is the price/performance ratio.. it's MUCH cheaper buying a ps3 to play games, so the pc game industry can get back on its feet again! AND, in 2-3 years, we'll start having photo realistic games!!! yummy!

but that's if the crap microsoft just spouted up there is true...lol

I would be excited if we could run this as for secondary graphics. My notebooks battery life would double if this would run the secondary graphics for surfing the net. When I play games my dedicated gpu would turn on. It was about the only I really did like on the new macbooks but it needs to be more seemless design. I'm hoping we get their larabee might be the frist step. Might being the key word

@sparky2010: that's FPS for 800x600 and lowest settings don't confuse yourselfurself

ah... slight error on my part then.. but still a good idea nonetheless.. haha.. hmmm.

DXRick, I've heard of such things from DX, but I've never seen it work as I've had to deal with two blown home video cards (X800XT & X1900XTX) and there was no such thing as booting Windows without anything in the AGP slot (no IGP).

DX is theirs, so it doesn't matter how they spin it, wether they say "we're finally building an OS that can support the DX10-10.1 feature to boot up Windows without any gfx card" or "we're introducing a new feature in Windows 7" is basically the same thing.

Awesome. Now if only my GPU could act as a partial processor when I do video encoding. Oh wait, we have that now too. I'd like to see GPUs and CPUs integrate more, and be able to do anything. It would be awesome if Windows 7 allows me to play more GPU heavy games on my older Athlon systems. It might actually be an OS worth my cash "upgrading" to.

lol @ no graphics card at all

*me tries in vain to plug the DVI cable into a USB port*

Oh noes?

mtyermom,
You joke but there is the possibility we might switch video to usb in the future, or even smaller form connector.

However, for the time being there will be a regular DVI output on the motherboard close to where your usb ports are so calm down.

If the video card is toast, what will give the display to the monitor so you can continue working?

Perhaps just logging in remotely...but this means using another computer anyways...hmm.

Good point radman, users of laptops will definitely get a huge benefit if they are able to port this over the laptop and be able to increase the lifespan of the battery or even the laptop myself.

On another note, there's 2 items that I want to ask:

1) How are nVidia and AMD going to react to this when they find out their integrated graphic chipsets will not be needed when Windows 7 comes out? This will seriously affect their revenue and their business model.

2)If graphics will now be computed on the CPU instead of the GPU, will this cause overheating issues and reduce the lifetime of the CPU?

Just some thoughts...

who is the jackass running a game at 800x600 resolution ?!!

Is this another F...... from MS ? the same way they did with the vista capable logos ?

Here's a key application: web interface enhancement. IE 9 and SilverLight 3 would likely have WARP integration that would allow an entirely new online experience to be had, and widely available without a client-side application running (other than the OS, obviously).

well thinking that the cpu can run graphics and everything else it is doing in the background. it is ok.

Now if we could get the copper out and put fibers optics in or something that sends information by light... hmm thinking we could send the amount of a 100 graphics cards they a special hook up like usb 9.2 or something. Well the cpu's are already small, just no one has a reason to make graphic chips so powerful unless windows 10 comes out. thinking it could be amazing 3d Imax kind of experience, gaming, movies and everything else you could think of. memory of love ones from pictures. feels like your their with them. i am sure we could take things far beyond this if we had the needs to.

I don't know of any remote-loggin utilities that allow the display of anything drawn in DirectX (including video). I always see the "No Capable DirectX video output found" message. Maybe this is a limitation of the current DirectX and will be altered with WARP.

As for getting local display output, maybe it can bypass the defective GPU and interface directly with the RAMDAC, in a similar fashion when you have no graphics drivers installed?

Does this mean I can *FINALLY* play Crysis over an RDP session?

Sure it'll play. But youll probably get only 10fps knowing Microsoft.

Wait ill get 15fps omg call the press this is sort of useless most people already have a gpu, the question IS what will the fps be on my tri- gtx 280 sli on windows 7?.

"The following are benchmarks from Microsoft’s own test of Crysis, running at 800x600 with the lowest quality settings"

Those look like numbers you see within sales departments. Outside of that environment the numbers will be lower as physics applies.

After DirectX8.1, many games asked for specific cards, and DirectX would refuse to emulate instructions that the graphics card didn't supported. So you had an Ti4200 and CoD4 refused to play on it, asking an... FX5200!
I hope we'll go back to the time when software filled the hardware gaps...

Lets see what we get when we crank it up to 1680x1050 and all high

Someone with an 8800GTS post what it does at 800X600 low quality. I'm guessing those MS numbers are 50%-100% better. If it scales it would be amazing.

Gosh reading what everybody is saying, one might think we at Tom's don't trust Microsoft and it's performance charts

Systems built to take advantage of WARP from a hardware standpoint will be able to display graphics even when the video card is missing—or toasted. So if you’ve nuked your graphics card from a bad BIOS flash, fear not on a WARP-capable system. At least you will be able to boot back up until the video card is replaced.

what a ridiculous thing to say, warp, or any other type of software rendering (which is exactly what warp is) can not possibly allow you to boot your computer if your video card is toast, it's just not possible.

warp is just microsoft marketing bullshit to make it sound like they developed somthing that hasn't already existed since the dawn of the personal computer.

before we had add in graphics cards all software ran on the cpu, including graphics. when the 3d accelerators (as they were known at the time) came along (i believe the voodoo was the first one) it allowed, via the use of the graphics api (application programing interface) the most of the 3d work to be offloaded from the cpu to the card.

as gpu's became more complex and supported more features graphics api's evolved to allow programmers to exploit said features (often time microsoft worked hand in hand with the gpu manufactures).

now, with windows 7, microsoft plans to include a software rasterizer built into the direct x api but so what? i can just as easily install a software rasterizer on my current windows build and in fact i believe all direct x versions already include one for testing purposes.

if you graphics hardware stops working, there is no way for the computer to boot (the motherboards bios will still beep and the monitor will still not turn on, all you'll get is that little orange light that let's you know no signal is going to the monitor), warp or not you still need to be able to get a signal to the monitor, either from a discrete graphics card or from the on board chip via the connector on the motherboard.

the only thing that warp could allow you to do is run a 3d game if the graphics driver crashed but that's assuming windows wasn't designed to blue screen upon the crash of a video driver. and even if windows didn't blue screen (let's assume that windows used the same driver model linux does and all drivers were loadable modules that you could dynamically load and unload as the OS was running) why not just reload the driver or reboot.

lastly, if anyone wants to get really excited about something ray tracing is what you should keep an eye out for. intel recently demonstrated a 16 core (including hyper threading, so 8 actual cores) setup running a complex 3d demo, in real time, with a resolution of 1920x1080, ray tracing allows programmers to create super realistic environments without needing to write any complicated shaders and without needing dedicated graphics hardware.

Software rendering (aka CPU) is not new?? WTF are Microsoft talking about? All they've done is allow the CPU to do the shader calcs and the like -- it's just mathematics.

800 x 600 -- now that IS funny -- trying to remember when I played any game at 800 x 600 -- think it was 1994. Turn up the resolution to what most folks run today and turn up quality details to at least medium and you'll be measuring in seconds per frame instead of frames per second.

Just more evidence that Microsoft has gone off the deep end and scrambling to something "new" to help sell Windows 7.

Come on. Someone with an 8800GTS post some numbers.

I'm not sure I like the idea of having my operating system(especially Windows) distributing my load between graphics and CPU.......It sounds like it's a setup for disaster in a lot of cases =/