WARP - Running DX10 and DX11 Games on CPUs

As a MVP I was involved into testing this new Windows Advanced Rasterization Platform. They just published the first numbers

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd285359.aspx

Running Crysis on a 8 core CPU with a resolution of 800x600 at 7.2 fps is an achievement. If this would be hand-optimized very well, it would be the best way to write code for. 4 - 8 cores will be a common target platform in the next two years. Because it can be switched off if there is a GPU, this is a perfect target for game developers. What this means is that you can write a game with the DirectX 10 API and not only target all the GPUs out there but also machines without GPU ... this is one of the best developments for the PC market since a long time. I am excited!

The other interesting consequence from this development is: if INTELs "Bread & Butter" chips run games with the most important game API, it would be a good idea if INTEL would put a bunch of engineers behind this and optimize WARP (in case they haven't already done so). This is the big game market consisting of games like "The Sims" and "World of Warcraft" and similar games that we are talking about here. The high-end PC gaming market is much smaller.