Geometry pipelines

Geometric manipulation of modeling primitives, such as that performed by a geometry pipeline, is the first stage in computer graphics systems which perform image generation based on geometric models. While Geometry Pipelines were originally implemented in software, they have become highly amenable to hardware implementation, particularly since the advent of very-large-scale integration (VLSI) in the early 1980s. 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.