Windows 7 Will Provide DX10 Software GPU

According to a MSDN article, Windows 7 will allow running DirectX 10 applications on any kind of hardware, from a DirectX 9 or lower GPU to no GPU at all (systems with no graphics card). The new feature called, WARP10 is a high speed, fully conformant software rasterizer.

By providing WARP, development is simplified by removing the need to spend time building a custom software rasterizer and tuning your application for it instead of hardware. By providing a single, conformant general purpose software rasterizer, there is no longer a need to write image rendering algorithms in multiple ways simply to run on hardware or software with different features and capabilities. Developers can still choose to implement algorithms in multiple ways if it would help achieve better performance or scaling, however they do not need to change the API or rendering architecture used to implement those algorithms. Instead, a developer can focus on creating a great Direct3D 10 application and know that it will look the same and perform well on hardware or in software.

In plain English, WARP10 will not specifically be geared towards gamers but towards the non-gamers who do not have a graphics processor like Mom and Dad. We will share more information as things unravel.