Hardware T&L had been used by arcade game system boards since 1993,[1] and by home video game consoles since the Sega Genesis's Virtua Processor (SVP), Sega Saturn's SCU-DSP and Sony PlayStation's GTE in 1994 and the Nintendo 64's RSP in 1996, though it wasn't traditional hardware T&L, but still software T&L running on a coprocessor instead of the main CPU, and could be used for rudimentary programmable pixel and vertex shaders as well.
Nvidia's GeForce 256 was released in late 1999 and introduced hardware support for T&L to the consumer PC graphics card market.
[2] S3 Graphics launched the Savage 2000 accelerator in late 1999, shortly after GeForce 256, but S3 never developed working Direct3D 7.0 drivers that would have enabled hardware T&L support.
STMicroelectronics' PowerVR Kyro II, released in 2001, was able to rival the costlier ATI Radeon DDR and NVIDIA GeForce 2 GTS in benchmarks of the time, despite not having hardware transform and lighting.
Futuremark's 3DMark 2000 heavily utilized hardware T&L, which resulted in the Voodoo 5 and Kyro II both scoring poorly in the benchmark tests, behind budget T&L video cards such as the GeForce 2 MX and Radeon SDR.
After hardware T&L had become standard in GPUs, the next step in computer 3D graphics was DirectX 8.0 with fully programmable vertex and pixel shaders.