Editing Shader (section)

== Parallel processing ==
Shaders are written to apply transformations to a large set of elements at a time, for example, to each pixel in an area of the screen, or for every vertex of a model. This is well suited to [[parallel computing|parallel processing]], and most modern GPUs have multiple shader [[graphics pipeline|pipeline]]s to facilitate this, vastly improving computation throughput.

A programming model with shaders is similar to a [[higher order function]] for rendering, taking the shaders as arguments, and providing a specific [[dataflow]] between intermediate results, enabling both [[data parallelism]] (across pixels, vertices etc.) and [[pipeline parallelism]] (between stages). (see also [[map reduce]]).