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When did this happen?
Recently. Here is my short history of graphics hardware.

In the beginning, there was the frame buffer. Somebody had to solder together the first one of these. Before that we were doing graphics on oscilloscopes.

Ten years later we saw the first polygon rasterization hardware.

A few years later you could buy one of these rasterizers to accelerate PC graphics.

In the mid 90's advanced features, like 3D textures, began showing up.

Two years ago we saw the first "Geometry Processor" with on-board transform and lighting. This was a real break through in performance.

Last year, we got our first taste of programmability on commodity graphics hardware with a few simple texture blending operations.

And this year... well, I just described that. And, what a difference!