This makes it rather interesting for lower-end system users. With hardware T & L, you might well be able to see similar quality visuals at a similar speed (in terms of fps) on a 'lowly' Pentium II 300Mhz. Having said that, when we see a REAL game with T&L (such as Black & White) we'll let you know. Don't expect to see many anytime soon though, after having spoken with game developers on campus it seems that games featuring T&L won't be seeing the light of day until late Q1 by our own guess. With the launch of NV10 (NVIDIA's T&L part) scheduled for the later half of this year, there will still probably be a couple of 'sponsored' titles by Christmas but it won't be 'the norm' as such. In order for game developers to hard-code in transformation and lighting, they would need to start from DirectX 7.0 ground-up. The trouble is that most games being developed for this Xmas have already been in the development cycle for a year and thus been coded in DirectX6.0. NVIDIA can thank Microsoft's DirectX7 schedule for this one…

The one company that might threaten all of this T&L shenanigans could well be Intel who, in the next 18 months, do have some high-end graphics aspirations. How much longer will they continue to allow 3D chip manufacturers to do the geometry for their CPUs? We doubt they'll take kindly to an NV10 making their latest and greatest CPUs that bit more redundant with T&L being handled by the graphics sub-system instead of the CPU itself. Could this be the reason why 3dfx, PowerVR, S3, Matrox et .al are not yet opting or talking about a future hardware transformation & lighting part? Or are they just lagging behind NVIDIA?

As for the hardware Transform & Lighting that is in the works by NVIDIA and other graphics chip designers…Intel has another idea. They feel that T & L for the masses will stay on the CPU. Even for games, they make the case that hardware T & L will limit the game developer's pallet and tend to produce games that look alike. The CPU is more flexible, they say. Developers can put the additional horsepower to work where they want it, in T & L, in more elaborate AI or physics, in web based streaming voice, music and movies.