I thought it worthwhile reporting here that Mikael Hvidtfeldt Christensen (StructSynth creator) is doing some interesting stuff in this area.
Notably he has created a
Fragmentarium ide, an open source, cross-platform IDE for exploring pixel based graphics on the GPU.
I have successfully built his latest production (on linux, although I followed the build script rather than run it directly). I certainly recommend following his
Syntopia blog.
NB: Windows and Mac users (soon?) can download binaries.
Probably best suited to user with NVIDIA graphics cards (problems noted with ATI graphics cards)
, it is really early days yet and I guess plenty of time to help Mikael out with issues like ATI cards etc.