Target Customers
The target customer base for WARP10, put most concisely, is all applications that can use Direct3D 10 or 10.1. This includes:
Casual Games
Games that have simple rendering requirements but also want the ability to use impressive visual effects that can be hardware accelerated. The majority of the best selling game titles for Windows are either simulations or casual games, neither of which requires high performance graphics, but both styles of games greatly benefit from modern shader based graphics and the ability to scale on hardware if present.
Existing Non-Gaming Applications
There is a large gamut of graphical applications that want to minimize the number of code paths in their rendering layer. WARP10 enables these applications to implement a single Direct3D 10, 10.1, or 11 code-path that can target a very large number of machine configurations.
Advanced Rendering Games
Game developers that want to isolate graphics card or driver specific rendering errors. We believe that all games, even extremely graphically demanding games would benefit from being able to render their content using WARP to validate that any visual artifacts they might experience are due to rendering errors or problems with hardware or drivers.
As mentioned above, the target customers for WARP also include those that may not use Direct3D 10 or 10.1 currently. This includes applications that need to ‘always work’ on all machines, image processing applications that don’t want to write CPU and GPU versions of image processing algorithms, image processing algorithms where speed or use the GPU is not critical such as printing, and emulators and virtual environments that are attempting to display advanced 3D graphics.
The target audience for the November SDK BETA release of WARP10 is to get the WARP10 rasterizer into the hands of developers. We feel confident at this stage of our development that we have achieved a high level of conformance and we are currently working on improving our performance and multi-core scalability. We are working hard to test WARP10 in more unusual situations and with more varied and diverse applications. Between this beta release and the final release of WARP10 in Windows 7, there should be noticeable increases in performance as well as scaling efficiently and any conformance feedback we receive from this beta and our continued testing.
We don’t see WARP10 as a replacement for graphics hardware, particularly as reasonably performing low end Direct3D 10 discrete hardware is now available for under $25. The goal of WARP10 was to allow applications to target Direct3D 10 level hardware without having significantly different code paths or testing requirements when running on hardware or when running in software.
