From the article I see that the card only did texture mapping, which is still a lot of work, but it makes sense that if the CPU needs to handle transforms then the GPU is just waiting on that data before it rips through it. Later in the article it mentions nvidia implementing geometry calculations in hardware, then I remembered that "hardware T&L" was a selling point at the time. It's crazy to see how the role of the graphics card has evolved over the years, now a massive chunk of them aren't even used for graphics work.