Ancient chipsets are a huge pain to work with. This is 2012, I think a hardware overhaul upgrade renovation is called for

I understand that vertex shaders can be emulated in software but I thought pixel shaders were ALWAYS hardware nowadays.

The REF device emulates everything, I believe - it simply ignores whatever graphics hardware you have. It basically behaves as if you had a fully featured, correctly working graphics card (minus the speed). The "software" device (i.e. HAL device with software assistance) however only emulates rasterization and vertex shading. As it should, anyway, I mean if the CPU starts texturing pixels you may as well plug the DVI cable in it and call it a day.

Ancient chipsets are a huge pain to work with. This is 2012, I think a hardware overhaul upgrade renovation is called for

I understand that vertex shaders can be emulated in software but I thought pixel shaders were ALWAYS hardware nowadays.

The REF device emulates everything, I believe - it simply ignores whatever graphics hardware you have. It basically behaves as if you had a fully featured, correctly working graphics card (minus the speed). The "software" device (i.e. HAL device with software assistance) however only emulates rasterization and vertex shading.

Ancient chipsets are a huge pain to work with. This is 2012, I think a hardware overhaul upgrade renovation is called for

I understand that vertex shaders can be emulated in software but I thought pixel shaders were ALWAYS hardware nowadays.

The REF device emulates everything, I believe - it simply ignores whatever graphics hardware you have. The "software" device (i.e. HAL device with software assistance) however only emulates rasterization and vertex shading.