I am looking the fastest way to draw thousands of individually calculated pixels directly to the screen in an iPhone application that preforms extremely well.
In all graphics frameworks I've ever used, the way you'd do this is to write your pixels into a block of memory (in ARGB or RGBA format for example), and then push the whole block of memory to the graphics subsystem. No "draw one point" API can possibly be fast, if you want to draw thousands of pixels quickly you need to push an image/texture/bitmap/whatever-you-want-to-call-it, rather than pushing individual points one at a time.