WARP10 (Windows Advanced Rasterization Platform) is a new component that will be part of DirectX graphics technology in Windows 7. WARP10 is a high speed, fully conformant software based rasterizer that can be used as a low end alternative to emulate Direct X 10.x utilizing your computer’s CPU processing power, even if your GPU does not support it or lacks some features.

The minimum specifications for WARP include 800MHz CPU and 512MB RAM. In return, you get Direct3D 10 and 10.1 support, 8x multi-sampled anti-aliasing, anisotropic filtering and optional texture formats. Obviously, the frames per second won’t be as good as when you have a dedicated GPU but it is good for purposes such as 3D CAD applications, casual gaming, simulations, debugging 3D applications and medical applications.

WARP allows fast rendering in a variety of situations where hardware implementations are unavailable, including:

+ When the user does not have any Direct3D capable hardware
+ When running as a service or in a server environment
+ When no video card installed
+ When a video driver is not available, or is not working correctly
+ When a video card is out of memory, hangs or would take too many system resources to initialize