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The company says the Windows Advanced Rasterization Platform 10 (WARP10) system in Windows 7 can run Direct3D 10 and 10.1 on the CPU, potentially bringing improved graphics to devices with no dedicated hardware.

According to Microsoft documentation, WARP brings fast rendering to a variety of situations where hardware implementations are currently unavailable, such as "when the user does not have any Direct3D capable hardware, is running as a service or in a server environment, or when a video card is out of memory".

Benchmarks suggest the system will be quicker than Intel's incumbent integrated DirectX 10 graphics. Running Crysis at 800x600 with the lowest quality settings, an eight-core Core i7 system recorded an average frame rate of 7.36fps, compared with 5.17fps from Intel's DirectX 10 integrated graphics.

Although the benchmark documentation claims

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improvements in a number of configurations, Microsoft says WARP10 will work best in multicore chips.

"As WARP10 makes extensive use of multiple CPU cores, the best performance of the rasterizer will be found on modern quad core CPU's," the company says in a Microsoft Developer Network document.

"WARP10 also runs significantly faster on machines with SSE4.1 extensions and we have done testing and performance tuning on machines with eight or more cores and SSE4.1 as we believe these high-end machines will be common during the lifetime of Windows 7."

However, the technology won't replace the dedicated hardware needed for intensive rendering tasks, such as gaming or video production.

"When WARP10 is running on the CPU we are limited compared to a graphics card in a number of ways," Microsoft says. "The front side bus speed of a CPU is typically around or under 10GB/sec where as a graphics card often has dedicated memory that is able to take advantage of 20-100GB/sec or more of graphics bandwidth.

"Graphics hardware also has fixed function units that can perform complex and expensive tasks like texture filtering, format decompression or conversions asynchronously with very little overhead or power cost."

Microsoft hopes the system will circumvent the graphics compatibility problems that plagued the launch of Vista.