How computers display raw, low-level text and graphics
From the early days of the IBM PC and its clones, the display adapter hardware was very simple: a small block of memory was dedicated to a grid of character cells (80x25 characters in the standard mode), with two bytes of memory for each cell. One byte selected the character, and the other selected its "attributes" - foreground and background colors plus blink control for color adapters; bold, underlined, blinking, or reverse video for monochrome adapters. The video output hardware looked up pixels from a ROM table of character shapes according to the contents of character memory.
In order to offer a certain degree of hardware independence, the BIOS interface to the character map required a software interrupt to be executed in order to set a single character cell on the screen. This was slow and inefficient. However, the character memory was directly addressable by the CPU as well, so if you knew what hardware was present, you could write directly to memory instead. Either way, once set, the character would remain on screen until changed, and the total character memory you needed to work with was 4000 bytes - about the size of a single 32x32 full color texture today!
In the graphics modes, the situation was similar; each pixel on screen is associated with a particular location in memory, and there was a BIOS set-pixel interface but high performance work required writing directly to memory. Later standards like VESA let the system do a few slow BIOS-based queries to learn the memory layout of the hardware, then work directly with memory. This is how an OS can display graphics without a specialized driver, although modern OSes do also include basic drivers for every major GPU manufacturer's hardware. Even the newest NVidia card will support several different backwards compatibility modes, probably all the way back to IBM CGA.
One important difference between 3D graphics and 2D is that in 2D you don't generally need to redraw the entire screen every frame. In 3D, if the camera moves even a tiny bit, every pixel on the screen might change; in 2D, if you aren't scrolling, most of the screen will be unchanged frame-to-frame, and even if you are scrolling, you can generally do a fast memory-to-memory copy instead of recomposing the whole scene. So it's nothing like having to execute INT 10h for every pixel every frame.
Source: I'm really old
That's (partly) the role of the BIOS.
The Basic Input Output System of the computer is responsible for providing a common interface to operating systems, despite such differences between actual computers.
That said, for graphics specifically, there are different ways of drawing to the screen. There are TTY commands that you can send to the BIOS, but that's only in real mode. If you want to draw anything in protected mode, you need to use VGA to draw things. I can't explain it better than OSDev, so look here for more info -- but basically, you can write to memory (video memory is memory-mapped) starting at address 0xB8000 to draw things on the screen.
If you need higher resolution than VGA, you need to use the VESA BIOS extensions; I'm not familiar with it, but try looking at the GRUB source code for more info.
Some useful references:
GRUB source code:
grub-core/video/i386/pc/vbe.c grub-core/video/i386/pc/vga.cOSDev Wiki (Drawing in Protected Mode)
VESA BIOS Extensions
If you happen to be familiar with D -- I wrote a little boot loader a while back that was able to write to the screen (text only). If you're interested, here's the code:
align(2) struct Cell { char ch; ubyte flags = 0x07; }
@property Cell[] vram()
{ return (cast(Cell*)0xB8000)[0 .. CONSOLE_WIDTH * CONSOLE_HEIGHT]; }
void putc(char c)
{
if (isBochs) { _outp(0xE9, c); } // Output to the Bochs terminal!
bool isNewline = c == '\n';
while (cursorPos + (isNewline ? 0 : 1) > vram.length)
{
for (short column = CONSOLE_WIDTH - 1; column >= 0; column--)
{
foreach (row; 0 .. CONSOLE_HEIGHT - 1)
{
uint cell = column + cast(uint)row * CONSOLE_WIDTH;
vram[cell] = vram[cell + CONSOLE_WIDTH];
}
vram[column + (CONSOLE_HEIGHT - 1) * CONSOLE_WIDTH].ch = ' ';
}
cursorPos = cast(ushort)(cursorPos - CONSOLE_WIDTH);
}
if (isNewline)
cursorPos = cast(ushort)
((1 + cursorPos / CONSOLE_WIDTH) * CONSOLE_WIDTH);
else vram[cursorPos++].ch = c;
}
void putc(char c, ubyte attrib) { vram[cursorPos] = Cell(c, attrib); }
void memdump(void* pMem, size_t length)
{
foreach (i; 0 .. length)
putc((cast(char*)pMem)[i]);
}
void clear(char clear_to = '\0', ubyte attrib = DEFAULT_ATTRIBUTES)
{
foreach (pos; 0 .. vram.length)
vram[pos] = Cell(clear_to, attrib);
cursorPos = 0;
}
@property ushort cursorPos()
{
ushort result = 0;
_outp(0x3D4, 14);
result += _inp(0x3D5) << 8;
_outp(0x3D4, 15);
result += _inp(0x3D5);
return result;
}
@property void cursorPos(ushort position)
{
_outp(0x3D4, 14);
_outp(0x3D5, (position >> 8) & 0xFF);
_outp(0x3D4, 15);
_outp(0x3D5, position & 0xFF);
}
During boot the system BIOS looks for the video adapter. In particular, it looks for the video adapter's built in BIOS program and runs it. This BIOS is normally found at location C000h in memory. The system BIOS executes the video BIOS, which initializes the video adapter.
Which levels or modes of video/graphics the BIOS can display natively, without an OS or drivers, is primarily dependant on the Video BIOS itself.
Source/More Info Here - "System Boot Sequence"