GoKawiilMicrosoft announced Advanced Shader Delivery (ASD) for Xbox ROG Ally devices last year, bringing precompiled shaders to the handheld to improve load times. Since then, ASD has been included in the DirectX SDK, with both Intel and Nvidia already releasing their own versions of the tech. Today, AMD joins them as Microsoft expands ASD beyond handhelds to RDNA 3, RDNA 3.5, and RDNA 4 GPUs.
Forza Horizon 6 is the latest game to feature ASD on Windows 11 PCs, but you need the Microsoft Store/Xbox PC app version to take advantage of it. Using an RX 7600 GPU and a Ryzen 7 5800 CPU, Advanced Shader Delivery helped the game boot up 95% faster, taking only four seconds to load on first launch. Without ASD enabled, Forza Horizon 6 took nearly a minute and a half to load otherwise.
This is because every time you install a new game or go through an update, the game needs a fresh shader cache, which can take a few minutes to rebuild. Even if you don't touch the game, but your GPU drivers are updated, you need to recompile shaders for all of your games when you open them for the first time. This process is necessary because shader compilation is performed on-device and must account for hardware variability.
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(Image credit: Microsoft)
Microsoft's solution is to decouple shaders from drivers entirely and place them in a Precompiled Shader Database (PSDB) that lives in the cloud. Every time you download a game from the Microsoft Store or the Xbox PC app, ASD detects your specific configuration (game, GPU, driver) and downloads the precompiled shaders in advance. So, when you open the game, the shaders are already compiled, and you don't have to wait.
Consoles have done this forever, which makes sense considering they don't have to worry about different hardware configs. Even Valve has a version of precompiled shaders for Linux that it developed for the Steam Deck, but never ported to Windows. Since SSDs have made long load times a thing of the past, this has been one of the last remaining hurdles to instantaneous game launches.
"PC Gaming" preview in the Xbox Insider Hub (Image credit: Future)
Advanced Shader Delivery is available only on RDNA 3 and later GPUs and only on games downloaded via the Xbox PC app or the Microsoft Store. We don't know when other Windows marketplaces will adopt it, but at least 34 other games should support ASD right away, since they were part of the original announcement for the Xbox ROG Ally handhelds.
Moreover, you need to be enrolled in the Xbox Insiders program to get the Xbox Insiders Hub app, which is required to enable Advanced Shader Delivery, since Microsoft is classifying this as a preview. The company worked closely with AMD to develop it, which is why it's limited to RDNA 3+ hardware for now, because otherwise, it's supposed to be a universal solution for all GPUs on Windows 11 going forward.
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