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Figuring out the best way to transform a frozen pizza into a perfectly warmed pie, gooey on top and crispy on the bottom, is as much a computer problem as a work of culinary art.

General Mills, maker of the Totino’s and Jeno’s brands of pizzas, would prefer not to whip up a thousand combinations of mozzarella cheese, tomato paste, crust and chemicals and blast them with microwave radiation. It’s a lot less expensive and easier to model different pizzas using a sophisticated computer and only cook up the best candidates.

To speed up the task, General Mills turned to computers containing high-powered graphics chips from Nvidia, a Santa Clara company best known for making video games look more realistic on game consoles and personal computers.

Energy exploration companies, clothing designers, medical companies and financial services have also bought systems running on Nvidia chips. All of these companies share a common problem: They need hardware that can analyze a vast quantity of data and do it much faster than standard computers.

Nvidia, which dominates the market for stand-alone graphics processors, has a clear lead over competitors to provide this kind of industrial data crunching, thanks to a risky bet the company made several years ago.

Deliberately giving up some of its graphics performance, Nvidia created a new interface, released in 2006, that lets computer programmers easily tap the hundreds of processing engines on a graphics chip to handle other tasks that require a large number of simultaneous calculations.

“A couple of billion dollars in R&D later, scientists and researchers around the world have come out to thank us,” said Jen-Hsun Huang, Nvidia’s co-founder and chief executive.

If the expensive gamble pays off, Nvidia could break out of its graphics niche and become a far more significant player in the computing landscape. “Once you have lots and…

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