Conway's Game of Life

I wibbled a bit at this entry in the lisp community, which prompted me to go and dig out my old Life implementation. I'm now wondering what is a fast way of turning a list of co-ordinates into an image on modern hardware and software. Plot them into a bitmap and then use BITBLT primitives to transfer it to the screen? Use a display list mechanism to get the graphics hardware to plot them?

Compared to my lightweight life algorithm the graphics is a beast. OTOH modern computers are so fast that you can probably plot only a tiny fraction of the generations and it'll look OK.