Fingerprinting of fragment shaders and use of same to perform shader concatenation

An automated method of concatenating a plurality of image processing instruction sets, wherein each image processing instruction set comprises data representing an estimate of processing resources required by the image processing instruction set, said method comprising:

• retrieving said plurality of image processing instruction sets from a storage;
• evaluating said data to generate an estimate of the processing resources required by a concatenated set of instructions;
• and
• when the estimate of the processing resources required by the concatenated set of instructions does not exceed processing resources of an available processing unit, generating the concatenated set of instructions by combining said plurality of image processing instruction sets.

A non-transitory machine readable medium storing a program which when executed by at least one processing unit quantifies a set of processing resources used by an image transform operation, the program comprising:

• a set of instructions for receiving a set of image processing instructions for performing the transform operation;
• a set of instructions for generating, for the received set of image processing instructions, data that estimates an amount of processing resources required to perform the set of image processing instructions;
• and
• a set of instructions for associating said data with the set of image processing instructions, said association allowing evaluation of the data at run-time to facilitate execution of the set of image processing instructions on a particular processing unit having a particular set of processing resources.

A non-transitory machine readable medium storing a program which when executed by at least one processing unit concatenates a plurality of image processing instruction sets wherein each image processing instruction set comprises data representing an estimate of processing resources required by the image processing instruction set, the program comprising:

• a set of instructions for retrieving said plurality of image processing instruction sets from a storage;
• a set of instructions for evaluating said data to generate an estimate of the processing resources required by a concatenated set of instructions;
• and
• a set of instructions for generating, when the estimate of the processing resources required by the concatenated set of instructions does not exceed processing resources of an available processing unit, the concatenated set of instructions by combining said plurality of image processing instruction sets.