For applications which displayed 3D graphics, sure. But using graphics acceleration as a more general tool on the desktop took a while longer - the first, experimental window compositors for X11 showed up around 2006.
Although Apple already started using compositing in 2002 with Quartz Extreme in Mac OS X 10.2, which also had X11 support.
NeXTstep used Display Postscript. AFAIK this has no concept of 3D acceleration or anything akin to it, and was almost entirely unaccelerated.
NeXT slabs and cubes did have a low-function blitter used to composite the main display.
Before that, just well-tuned 68030 burst block copy - they rendered to backing store and did block copies with a special case of vram to vram block copies (used for window compositing).
What do you understand by "display compositing" that doesn't involve 3D hardware?