Can't windows 7 run game effects in software?

[mas5acre]

If I were to build an i7 machine and use current gpu tech, couldn't future games use software emulation to run unsupported gpu effects? I remember reading about this a while back, SOFTWARE IS SLOW, this I know, but an i7 I was thinking would have enuff cores to handle this and gaming at the same time.

[johan851]

The problem is still that software is slow on the order of about 10x or so. Maybe more, now that CPUs haven't scaled quite the way GPUs have. An i7 still won't be able to handle graphics - it's optimized for fast "general" processing, not graphics processing.