How it works today: graphics

Modern graphics stacks are much larger than VBE and linear framebuffer writes. The CPU usually does not draw every pixel into visible display memory. It submits commands, buffers, textures, and shaders to a GPU through a driver and graphics API.

What changed

Modern systems use GPU drivers, command buffers, shaders, compositors, window systems, and APIs such as Vulkan, Metal, Direct3D, OpenGL, or WebGPU. The final image may pass through multiple buffers. A compositor may combine windows, apply scaling, and present according to display timing.

The stack exists because GPUs are powerful and parallel. Drawing every pixel on the CPU would waste hardware that can transform vertices, shade pixels, sample textures, and blend layers.

What stayed useful

Framebuffer thinking still matters. Images are arrays of pixels, pitch and stride exist in modern textures, clipping and coordinates still matter, double-buffering and presentation remain core ideas, and rendering should be separated from application state.

lcom-ng uses VBE-shaped graphics because it exposes those ideas without a full GPU stack.