A resource used by a shader executed by a graphics processing unit is referenced using a “descriptor”. Descriptors are grouped together in memory called a descriptor heap. Applications allocate and store descriptors in descriptor heaps. Applications also create one or more descriptor tables specifying a subrange of a descriptor heap. To bind resources to a shader, descriptors are first loaded into a descriptor heap. When the resources are to be used by a set of executing shaders, descriptor tables are defined on the GPU identifying ranges within the descriptor heap. Shaders, when executing, refer to the currently defined descriptor tables to access the resources made available to them. If the shader is to be executed again with different resources, and if those resources are already in memory and specified in the descriptor heap, then the descriptor tables are changed to specify different ranges of the descriptor heap.