Paul Frew
Windows 7 will allow computers with no graphics card to play Crysis
December 11th 2008 22:54
I'm generally a fierce opponent of Microsoft and their ill-conceived products, but this announcement about Windows 7 has me nodding along: Windows 7 will feature a software layer to allow computers with no graphics card to play Crysis!
"...dubbed Windows Advanced Rasterization Platform or WARP, the new graphics layer for Windows 7 will utilize the system CPU as the graphics engine to assist old graphics cards, and take over completely in some cases. Microsoft indicates that WARP will be fully dependent on how powerful the CPU is in a system"
That's fantastic - really excellent, actually. I love the push by software developers to bring increased utility to users. Up till now, Linux has been the operating system that leads this area of development - my latest version of KDE is meant to offer performance benefits to older hardware.
But this, this is incredible. The game isn't run at breakneck rates, but definitely playable, especially if your CPU packs a little more mustard: An 8-core i-7 running at 3.0 GHz gets an average frame rate of 7.36.
I know, that's pretty slow for a massive computer like that, but remember - no graphics card, to play a game that looks like this:
The point of this system is not to allow gamers to play high-end games at unacceptable frame rates - no, the point is to allow users to operate their system when something goes wrong, or a graphics card is unavailable:
"Although the performance differences between CPU-only WARP and discrete GPU accelerated graphics is large, WARP offers several advantages: users will still be able to run their 3D applications fully-accelerated when a video card driver is corrupted, missing, or improperly installed/configured. 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."
*this image is from Gamespot
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Comment by Yves Makhoul
Games Author
I'll stick with Apple. Yeah it's a closed ecosystem, but it works perfectly fine for me.