Automated construction of shader programs

U.S. Patent No. 7,733,347, Filed October 21, 2005.  Although GPUs have been harnessed to solve non-graphics problems, these solutions are not widespread because GPUs remain difficult to program. Instead, an interpreter simplifies the task of programming a GPU by providing language constructs such as a set of data types and operations that are more familiar to non-graphics programmers. The interpreter maps these familiar language constructs to the more difficult graphics programming resources such as DirectX.RTM., OpenGL.RTM., Cg.RTM., and/or HLSL.RTM.