Transform, clipping, and lighting

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Transform, clipping, and lighting (T&L or TCL) is a term used in computer graphics.

Overview

Transformation is the task of producing a two-dimensional view of a three-dimensional scene. Clipping means only drawing the parts of the scene that will be present in the picture after rendering is completed. Lighting is the task of altering the colour of the various surfaces of the scene on the basis of lighting information.

Hardware

Hardware T&L had been used by

of the time were producing increasingly complex scenes and detailed lighting effects much faster than the increase of CPU processing power.

Nvidia's GeForce 256 was released in late 1999 and introduced hardware support for T&L to the consumer PC graphics card market. It had faster vertex processing not only due to the T&L hardware, but also because of a cache that avoided having to process the same vertex twice in certain situations. While DirectX 7.0 (particularly Direct3D 7) was the first release of that API to support hardware T&L, OpenGL had supported it much longer and was typically the purview of older professionally oriented 3D accelerators which were designed for computer-aided design (CAD) instead of games.

Alladin's ArtX integrated graphics chipset also featured T&L hardware, being released in November 1999 as part of the Alladin VII motherboards for socket 7 platform.^[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.^[3]

Usefulness

Hardware T&L did not have broad application support in games at the time (mainly due to Direct3D games transforming their geometry on the CPU and not being allowed to use indexed geometries), so critics contended that it had little real-world value. Initially, it was only somewhat beneficial in a few OpenGL-based 3D first-person shooter titles of the time, most notably Quake III Arena. 3dfx and other competing graphics card companies contended that a fast CPU would make up for the lack of a T&L unit.

ATI's initial response to GeForce 256 was the dual-chip

which also implemented hardware T&L.

GTS.

GTS in benchmarks of the time, despite not having hardware transform and lighting. As more and more games were optimised for hardware transform and lighting, the KYRO II lost its performance advantage and is not supported by most modern games.

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.

Industry standardization

By 2000, only ATI with their comparable

. By the end of 2001, all discrete graphics chips would have hardware T&L.

Support of hardware T&L assured the GeForce and Radeon of a strong future, unlike its Direct3D 6 predecessors which relied upon software T&L. While hardware T&L does not add new rendering features, the extra performance allowed for much more complex scenes and an increasing number of games recommended it anyway to run at optimal performance.

7.0 generation.

After hardware T&L had become standard in GPUs, the next step in computer 3D graphics was DirectX 8.0 with fully programmable

.

References