Utter utter bollocks.

Didn't a certain someone allegedly say that 640KB was enough for everyone in the dim and distant past?

You have to bear in mind that the guy's post that prompted this works in research, it may come to nothing, like WinFS did.

But if it does, then its uses on the desktop may not be apparent yet. Back in the days before Xerox came up with the concept of a GUI, telling anyone that in less than half a century, your home PC would use up to 4GB of RAM would have been mind-boggling.

First, look at the MSDN article: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd285359.aspx unless it's against your religion to do so. Microsoft is touting Warp as a software fallback where the PC hardware is not up to the job. Well done to the ~5 posters who have seen this, your score a +10 on the scale of comprehending the MSDN article. -10 to Linix/Mac fanboys for seeing the word Microsoft, frothing at the mouth. A software fallback makes perfect sense on several fronts: 1. Older software that uses GDI/GDI+ gets a performance increase on Windows 7. GDI/GDI+ performance got walloped with Vista. Try running some VBA in Excel that builds graphs for example. Stupid new diver model and crap implementation from device manufactures. 2. Direct 3D games. The article mentions device CAPS, that's capabilities if I recall. Game coders have to examine what the device (graphics card) is capable of doing before trying to do it. EG: If its ATI and it's model X do routine Y, otherwise do Z. The code should just run in software emulation. It will be easier for developers to at least run the code without it crashing and identify where the fallback to software is. They are then free to develop a better workaround without having crash dumps to understand. EG quicker game development. 3. And in my opinion, most important. The GUI, Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) was introduced with Vista and on XP. While I think it's next to impossible to truly describe the potential impact of this, I'll have a go. a. It's vector based. Resolution and device independent graphics for example. Coordinates are double precision, if someone makes a massive monitor or a monitor with 600 pixels per inch capability, WPF will still cope without the display looking crap. b. Floating point precision colour. Put this in perspective, most colour values are byte based. One byte for red, another for blue, another for green and one more for alpha or opacity (transparency). A byte = 256 values. Ignoring the alpha channel, that's 256x256x256 colours, or 16,777,216 colours. A single (32bit) can be positive or negative in value, so lets be conservative and only use positive values; that's 3.402823e38 or 340,282,300,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000. Now multiply that by 3 for red, green and blue and you get: 120,846,900,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000. That should be enough colours to be getting on with. I imagine that display technology will take a while to catch up with a figure like that. c. 3D. Developers can use 3D in their applications without an intimate knowledge of how the Direct 3D API works. d. Recently, .net 3.5 SP1 introduced the ability for programmers to use shaders as well. It's early days yet; so useful implementations are bit thin on the ground. But you can introduce motion blur when a user is scrolling through a list of photos for example. All of this stuff does not come cheep, so MS are offloading as much as they can onto the GPU. But if the GPU fails for some reason, they don't want GUI developers trying to understand why and code round the problem. Warp enables them to at least have the app run, regardless of hardware. They are then free to either fix the problem or up the hardware limits. This technology has bugger all to do with playing Crysis, it's used as an example for gods sake.