I'm nostalgic for the days I had my Amstrad CPC664 home computer. Changing pixels was not fast enough even in machine code because I was writing maths art shapes to screen like a 3D spirograph and I wanted to rotate my palette through the selected colour numbers of my pixel plot sequences. So I studied the native OS calls and wrote machine code to sit in the fast interrupt tasks to switch the displayed colour for each plot number. back in those days I think the screen resolution options were bound to the available colours for each resolution. So I created locomotive basic extension to manage my colour rotation and made very cool high speed animations with static maths art images. The key is that I was not changing the pixel colour numbers, I was changing the display colour for each or the 4 or 16 ink plotting numbers. But I am very curious as to whether in windows and linux, whether this control level has been lost. If I were on for example an nvidia gfx card design team, I'd be wanting this layer of abstraction. But I think it's become all about finesse in colour range.