Windows Advanced Rasterization Platform (WARP) is a software rasterizer and a component of

DirectX Microsoft DirectX is a collection of application programming interfaces (APIs) for handling tasks related to multimedia, especially game programming and video, on Microsoft platforms. Originally, the names of these APIs all began with "Direc ...

graphics runtime in

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and later. It is available for

Windows Vista Windows Vista is a major release of the Windows NT operating system developed by Microsoft. It was the direct successor to Windows XP, which was released five years before, at the time being the longest time span between successive releases of ...

and

Windows Server 2008 Windows Server 2008 is the fourth release of the Windows Server operating system produced by Microsoft as part of the Windows NT family of the operating systems. It was released to manufacturing on February 4, 2008, and generally to retail on F ...

through platform update for Windows Vista. WARP can be used when no compatible hardware is available, in

kernel mode In computer science, hierarchical protection domains, often called protection rings, are mechanisms to protect data and functionality from faults (by improving fault tolerance) and malicious behavior (by providing computer security). Compute ...

applications or in a headless environment, or for remote rendering of

Direct2D Direct2D is a 2D vector graphics application programming interface (API) designed by Microsoft and implemented in Windows 10, Windows 8, Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2, and also Windows Vista and Windows Server 2008 (with Platform Update in ...

DirectWrite DirectWrite is a text layout and glyph rendering API by Microsoft. It was designed to replace GDI/GDI+ and Uniscribe for screen-oriented rendering and was first shipped with Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2, as well as Windows Vista and Windows ...

for Remote Desktop Connection clients. WARP is a full-featured

Direct3D Direct3D is a graphics application programming interface (API) for Microsoft Windows. Part of DirectX, Direct3D is used to render three-dimensional graphics in applications where performance is important, such as games. Direct3D uses hardware ...

10.1 renderer device with performance on par with current low-end

graphics card A graphics card (also called a video card, display card, graphics adapter, VGA card/VGA, video adapter, display adapter, or mistakenly GPU) is an expansion card which generates a feed of output images to a display device, such as a computer mo ...

s, such as Intel

GMA 3000 The Intel Graphics Media Accelerator (GMA) is a series of integrated graphics processors introduced in 2004 by Intel, replacing the earlier Intel Extreme Graphics series and being succeeded by the Intel HD and Iris Graphics series. This series ...

, when running on multi-core CPUs. To achieve this level of rendering performance, WARP employs advanced techniques such as

just-in-time compilation In computing, just-in-time (JIT) compilation (also dynamic translation or run-time compilations) is a way of executing computer code that involves compiler, compilation during execution of a program (at run time (program lifecycle phase), run tim ...

to x86

machine code In computer programming, machine code is any low-level programming language, consisting of machine language instructions, which are used to control a computer's central processing unit (CPU). Each instruction causes the CPU to perform a ver ...

and support for advanced vector extensions such as

SSE2 SSE2 (Streaming SIMD Extensions 2) is one of the Intel SIMD (Single Instruction, Multiple Data) processor supplementary instruction sets first introduced by Intel with the initial version of the Pentium 4 in 2000. It extends the earlier SSE ins ...

and SSE4.1. WARP supports Direct3D 11 runtime and is compatible with feature levels 10_1, 10_0, 9_3, 9_2, and 9_1; in Direct3D 11.1 runtime, WARP additionally supports feature levels 11_0 and 11_1. In Windows 8, WARP provides functionality for the "Microsoft Basic Render Driver" which replaces kernel-mode VGA driver. In Windows 8.1, WARP has been updated to support feature level 11_1 and tiled resources. In Windows 10, WARP has been updated to support Direct3D 12 at feature level 12_1; under Direct3D 12, WARP also replaces the Reference rasterizer.

References

External links

MSDN - Windows Advanced Rasterization Platform (WARP) Guide
DirectX Windows 7 {{windows-stub