I suppose it would be interesting to test with an older 3DMark version, such as 3DMark2000, 2001 or 03. I believe they all have DX7 tests, and you can select hw or sw T&L.
It's the first time I hear of this limitation anyway, and not sure why it would be there, because you can just install Vista and Windows 7 drivers in Windows 10. I'd expect them to just support T&L.

Intel HD's drivers for Windows 7 also does the slow DX7 3D stuff. I kind of like it for the 1999esque performance I get in certain games with it....

You could probably get it faster by wrappering through to better supported higher APIs maybe. 😉 though I don't know if dgVoodoo2 works off the top of my head

leileilol wrote:

Intel HD's drivers for Windows 7 also does the slow DX7 3D stuff.

Yea, that would make more sense to me.

shouldnt any cpu that support win10 be massively faster at t&l than than any dx7 era gpu ?

Davros wrote:

shouldnt any cpu that support win10 be massively faster at t&l than than any dx7 era gpu ?

Possibly, but that certainly doesn't go for newer GPUs, which still need to support DX7.

I tested dgvoodoo2 with the Intel HD chipset on the newest PC my parents have and it works but high resolutions have absolutely terrible framerate.

Not entirely sure how dgvoodoo2 is setting up it's own rendering given, well, Intel graphics on Windows isn't the best.

Hi,
According to 3dMark 2000 this rumor is not true.
There is a significant difference on Win10 between hardware and software T&L. E.g. in 8 light High polygon count test the difference is more than tenfold.
Although it seems there is an interesting difference between Win10 and WinXP/7 but it's not hardware T&L related. On Win10 it seems there is no native 16-bit rendering. On one hand 16-bit rendering is much slower than 32-bit (this is just the opposite on WinXP/7) and in Game1 Helicopter tests (sky and clouds) it's easy to notice that the typical 16-bit color banding artifacts (because of missing 16-bit dithering, very noticeable on all DX10+ hardware) are completely missing (they are present and very rude on WinXP/7).

Test system: OS: Win10 64-bit, CPU: Phenom II X4 down-clocked to 1GHz, GPU: Geforce 960 GTX
Result with hardware T&L:

Result with software T&L:

On my Win10 by default 3dMark 2000 was FPS capped by forced V-Sync so I had to apply a compatibility patch (attached).

I assume it is emulated in a way, but emulated through drivers and shader hardware. I doubt there would be much point in keeping fixed function DX7 style T&L units around in modern hardware if their functionality can be simulated with shader units.

That being said, I have no concrete info to back this up so I could be talking out of my backside. I have seen something along those lines mentioned elsewhere though.

Of course, if it's emulated in drivers it's possible that its support is not 100% solid. That could perhaps explain some performance issues, though Windows 8 and 10 have other well known issues that interfere with performance of old games.

DGVoodoo actually brought me a noticable performance boost.
And resolution didn't really matter, 640x480 and 1280x800, pretty much same framerate.
The game I tested was Gothic 2, its a very CPU intense game and my device has a very low single thread performance (Intel Atom Tablet)
But thanks to DGVoodoo my game actually runs playable now.
30-50fps outside of the city
~15-20fps within the city

before DGVoodoo I got like 5fps in the city xD

Silanda wrote:

I assume it is emulated in a way, but emulated through drivers and shader hardware. I doubt there would be much point in keeping fixed function DX7 style T&L units around in modern hardware if their functionality can be simulated with shader units.

Yea, it's been that way ever since the Radeon 9700. That was the first GPU that didn't have any fixed function T&L at all, and the driver generated the appropriate shader on-the-fly.
It also didn't have any integer vertex processing at all, it only had 24-bit float units, so all integer operations were translated to float as well, in the driver.
But of course it was still hardware-accelerated that way.
It could be that Intel generates CPU code instead of GPU code in some of their drivers, for DX7.
Falcosoft at least demonstrated that this is not true for all GPUs under Windows 10, which is exactly what I expected.

3d analyse has an emulate T&L option
I'm pretty sure I remember a benchmark from back in the day that said you need a 1.2 ghz Tbird cpu to do t&l faster than a geforce 256