Scouring the archived internet for an extensive amount of time, I found some programs that I have been looking for. Specifically, official applications that demonstrate the theoretical prowess of early T&L hardware. There are other old gems I have seen references to (like old NVIDIA SDKs), but never found the files for, and I believe it to be important to preserve them.

Benmark5 and learning_var are Direct3D and OpenGL programs respectively, with the latter likely only functioning on NVIDIA hardware. Both display the amount of polygons that are drawn every second, which is many millions on time-appropriate hardware. If you are curious, try them out to see your poly/s.