PURE D3D Hardware T&L: Pure Hardware T&L is a new pipeline in DirectX 8. When it is used, the 3D accelerator does all transform and lighting. No 3D operations can be done with software when Pure HW T&L is used, so the accelerator must support all features used in 3DMark2001 SE, including vertex and pixel shaders. D3D Hardware T&L: This pipeline uses the 3D hardware to do transform and lighting. Vertex Shaders may be calculated on the CPU if they are not supported in hardware. D3D Software T&L: This pipeline uses the transform and lighting engine that’s inside Microsoft DirectX 8.1. It is the default setting for all 3D accelerators that do not support Hardware T&L. Software T&L has been optimized for all processors and uses SSE, SSE2 and 3DNow! instructions if available.