1. A method of operating a shader, comprising the steps of: determining the functional shader pipelines of a plurality of shader pipelines; selecting portions of a graphics program to produce fragment programs that each include a limited number of program instructions that control processing of rasterized pixel data; segmenting the rasterized pixel data into segments of a limited size based on a number of words available in a memory associated with the functional shader pipelines in order to store each graphics primitive represented by the rasterized pixel data; distributing the segments of the rasterized pixel data only to the functional shader pipelines of the plurality of shader pipelines for processing by the fragment programs to produce shaded pixel data; broadcasting triangle information to the functional shader pipelines to configure a set of functional shader pipelines that are not processing a segment of rasterized pixel data and validating the triangle information to initiate processing of segments of rasterized pixel data by the set of functional shader pipelines using the triangle information to execute the fragment programs.