Pipelining is a very widespread and heavily used practice on stream processors, with GPUs featuring pipelines exceeding 200 stages. The cost for switching settings is dependent on the setting being modified but it is now considered to always be expensive. To avoid those problems at various levels of the pipeline, many techniques have been deployed such as "über shaders" and "texture atlases". Those techniques are game-oriented because of the nature of GPUs, but the concepts are interesting for generic stream processing as well.