It starts with something called WARP. according to this: http://social.msdn.microsoft.com/Forums/en/parallelcppnative/thread/774a19a5-4bf4-42dd-bee7-4cf2a74bfdb6
"WARP is a high speed, fully conformant software rasterizer. It is a component of the DirectX graphics technology that was introduced by the Direct3D 11 runtime."
WARP is part of DX 11.1, which for now is only going to be available on win8. If you have problems running some games now because your graphics hardware doesn't have the required level of Direct X support, WARP can *maybe* make that go away, doing the same stuff hardware might do, & it's supposed to be very, very fast. OTOH the game would have to be written to include WARP -- if it's not supported in win7 I would think that's anything but guaranteed. Perhaps that's why the door is left open, if only a crack, to releasing DX 11.1 for win7?
Now what *may* be bad news... http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/desktop/hh848038%28v=vs.85%29.aspx
"DescriptionIntel and AMD/ATI no longer support their DX9 graphics parts and will not be updating drivers for these devices for Windows 8. Furthermore, these devices are not covered in-box for Windows 8. The last drivers for these devices are those available on WU and on the OEM/IHV’s websites; many date from Vista, and many of these final version drivers exhibit problems on Windows 8. In addition, nVidia has recently stated that they will not support their DX9 (Vista and older) mobile (notebook) parts for Win8. They continue to support their desktop DX9 parts.
All of these driver/part combinations are on the Internet Explorer 9 software fallback list. This means that for either performance or stability reasons, Internet Explorer 9 uses software rendering on these devices. This is a good indication that the experience with Windows Store apps will not be satisfactory on these drivers and parts.
Manifestation
As there is no in-box support for these devices, many users with these parts will wind up running on the Microsoft Basic Display Driver. This is a WARP-based WDDM 1.2 software GPU, and is actually faster than some of the parts in this class, for example, the Intel GMA500 series). It supports aero-glass and DWM, and can run Windows Store apps.
However, it has some important limitations:
It doesn’t support multiple monitors or projection
It doesn’t support sleep, though it does support hibernation
It often will not allow changing screen resolution"
Your current hardware may or may not be supported in win8. If it is supported, according to this, DX 9 in hardware won't be. If you have supported lower end hardware it might mean a performance boost -- from the sounds of it, with higher end graphics hardware, if the game uses DX 9 [vs. 10 or 11 in higher priced games] not so much.
It'll be interesting to hear Whiterabbit's experiences since he's got higher end graphics, at least on his main rig, & I imagine quite a few DX 9 games. I'd expect if WARP provides enough assist to make things work using the CPU, the CPU will also run hotter. Imagine that might be a bigger issue on laptops though, where in addition to higher temps battery life would drop.
