NVIDIA GeForce2 Ultra

Faster T&L Means...?

With the higher clock speed comes a higher performing T&L engine, this time around it weighs in at 31 million triangles per second. While NVIDIA has definitely been pushing the T&L bandwagon for quite some time, we have truly yet to see a game that takes advantage of T&L to the point where it looks or performs noticeably worse without hardware T&L support.

An example of one such game is Shiny's Sacrifice which is due out later this year.

We were lucky enough to get a pre-release copy of it and managed to take some screenshots with T&L enabled and without it:

T&L Off

T&L On

Click Here to download the uncompressed versions of the above graphics

As you can probably tell, there is virtually no difference between the above two screenshots, the game looks just as good with T&L off as it does with T&L on. The performance is pretty similar although on slower machines having T&L on does definitely help out the frame rate. It seems like T&L implementations in games is still not as dramatic as NVIDIA & ATI would like it to be, not yet at least.

We managed to pay a visit to Epic not too long ago and take a look at what they're working on for their upcoming followup to UnrealTournament and let's just say that with the number of polygons they are planning to use in the characters, T&L will definitely be helpful.

For now, it's still not a necessity.