Low level graphics and you

After a long time of meditating on OpenGL I've come down with a bad case of "I don't know how to do anything and only use tools made by someone better than me". Since the only cure for this common programmer illness is more meditating I've decided I want to learn graphics on an even lower level than OpenGL, though finding a guide for this route has proven to be nigh impossible.

I'd appreciate it if a guru could give me a friendly pointer in the right direction or an insight on the things that take place between an OpenGL call and a pixel being displayed onscreen.

At the end of my journey I desire the ability of displaying but a single pixel without the aid of instruments given to me by the masters.

>>25
but it generates a triangle mesh on the fly to render it in the traditional OpenGL/DirectX pipeline
which pretty much kills the reasoning behind hardware acceleration.
>>27
>>23
I can't decide if you are an idiot or just a newbie. You don't use something like "setPixel" in graphics programming. Or you don't use glVertex (google "opengl immediate mode" for reasons)
GPUs work in a parallel way. You generate an mesh with vertices and indices and ask GPU to render them.