It’s certainly possible then that Win7 will be able to use WARP10 to enable aero in a VM (eventually).

It could also through WARP10 avoid the messy Intel GMA900/915 mess all over again by allowing the CPU to take over drawing Aero provided it is up to the task, WinSAT tests can simply evaluate it.

Likely there is a separate team working on Windows 7 compat for the next Virtual PC release. Hardware accelerated graphics would be cool, but tricky. Since Windows Vista/7 both use DirectX on the entire desktop, you could in theory write a display driver for the guest OS to make the host OS’ DirectX handle the guest OS rendering… which would allow for hardware acceleration using the host video card.

I imagine there are problems with this though, or it would have already been done in Virtual PC 2007 for Vista.

However Remote Desktop already has something like this, I believe. If you connect to a Vista machine from another Vista machine that supports Glass, your Remote Desktop session will have Glass, even if the remote computer itself doesn’t support it! (Disclaimer: IIRC) This may be good enough for you, and I believe it’s already a recommended solution for getting glass on a VM.

However under the assumption this is supposed to prevent another “Vista-capable” lawsuit… I’m guessing that this would enable either a) driver manufacturers to add support for Glass when previously there was none because their integrated video was too slow or b) to allow Windows to get a slight speed boost, just enough for Windows to decide your computer is good enough to support Glass after all (since part or all of the “Vista-capable” lawsuit, as I understand it, stems from MS promoting SHINY GLASS in Vista but then “Vista-capable” computers were shipped that couldn’t render Glass, as Windows’ benchmarks would decide your computer was too slow).

You can read more about WARP’s intended use/customers at MSDN (http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd285359.aspx#Target_Customers).

By the way, WARP has been in all the builds thus far (d3d10warp.dll). The problem is readers like yourself, fueled by poor journalism, have associated working Aero effects with WARP. Get that out of your head.

The screenshots they saw of Aero Glass were likely of Windows 7 6956 installed on a physical machine… there are instructions of how to do this floating around the internet on how to take the VHD and image a hard disk with it. Secondly there is also an ISO now so physical machine and virtual machine installation would be much simpler anyway.

BetaNews’ comments about WARP are justified… WARP is INTENDED to allow PCs without GPUs or with integrated (and thus slow) GPUs to use Aero Glass. Virtual Machines fit this description. Though I believe the original benchmarks of a WARP WIP were used to show Crysis running at something like 7fps on a CPU-only, compared to 5fps without WARP with an integrated GPU. Or something like that. Maybe it was 5 and 7 instead.

ANYWAY, the primary purpose is NOT to play Crysis, but to allow for Aero Glass (there’s the whole “Vista-capable” lawsuit which you should know something about if you’ve been watching slashdot or digg or whatever), I assume because DirectX is used to hardware accelerate the whole desktop, and because the very purpose of DirectX 10 is to force hardware manufacturers to have a specific base set of features so games can count on them being present, the WARP team just went ahead and implemented the entire DirectX 10 featureset (or 11. Windows 7 is supposed to ship with DX11. But that was a while ago, who knows if they’re still doing that) and thus games are possible. But games would definitely take a back seat in the feature list in favor of Aero and video playing performance.

I hear WARP is NOT included in 6956, hence VMs still show the Aero Basic theme.

Also there’s no Aero Glass in VirtualBox either, according to Troubleshooting the video drivers don’t support it. I assume this means WARP was not included in that build.