Shader program profiler

Systems, methods, and computer readable media to improve the development of image processing intensive programs are described. In general, techniques are disclosed to non-intrusively monitor the run-time performance of shader programs on a graphics processing unit (GPU)-that is, to profile shader program execution. More particularly, GPU-based hardware threads may be configured to run in parallel too, and not interfere with, the execution environment of a GPU during shader program execution. When so configured, GPU hardware threads may be used to accurately characterize the run-time behavior of an application program's shader operations.