A device called the Geometry Engine developed by Jim Clark and Marc Hannah at Stanford University in about 1981 was the watershed for what has since become an increasingly commoditized function in contemporary image-synthetic raster display systems.
Hardware implementations of the geometry pipeline were introduced in the early Evans & Sutherland Picture System, but perhaps received broader recognition when later applied in the broad range of graphics systems products introduced by Silicon Graphics (SGI).
More recently, perhaps dating from the late 1990s, the hardware support required to perform the manipulation and rendering of quite complex scenes has become accessible to the consumer market.
Companies such as Nvidia and AMD Graphics (formerly ATI) are two current leading representatives of hardware vendors in this space.
The GeForce line of graphics cards from Nvidia was the first to support full OpenGL and Direct3D hardware geometry processing in the consumer PC market, while some earlier products such as Rendition Verite incorporated hardware geometry processing through proprietary programming interfaces.