> I really just want to put pixels on the screen and work my way up from there
That really isn't how modern, accelerated graphics works - even 2D accelerated graphics! "Sprites" are slightly closer to the mark, but it goes far beyond that.
The entire framebuffer can be thought of as a huge sprite. Modern RAMDACs can scan multiple overlapping arbitrarily sized framebuffers (layers) simultaneously, while doing bilinear filtering, merging alpha, colorspace conversion, rotation, LUT, etc.
All that happens on the fly without intermediary frame buffer composition in between. The output goes directly to the display (over HDMI, eDP/displayport, DVI, etc.).
Yeah, and of course mouse cursor is a sprite in the traditional sense. Although on modern HW you could implement mouse cursor as a hardware layer.
That really isn't how modern, accelerated graphics works - even 2D accelerated graphics! "Sprites" are slightly closer to the mark, but it goes far beyond that.