Friday, October 2nd 2026
Microsoft's Advanced Shader Delivery Arrives to NVIDIA GeForce RTX GPUs Later This Month
Microsoft's Advanced Shader Delivery (ASD), which provides pre-compiled shaders with the game itself, is finally becoming available on a range of platforms. The company confirmed that this feature will expand to NVIDIA's GeForce RTX graphics cards and the RTX Spark platform later this month. This means that game developers will be able to ship pre-compiled shaders to speed up game loading times and reduce any shader-induced stuttering during gameplay. When Microsoft unveiled a public preview of ASD, it reportedly supported various AMD RDNA generations, but now more platforms are receiving support.
Currently, ASD is claimed to work on AMD RDNA 1, RDNA 2, RDNA 3, RDNA 3.5, and RDNA 4 GPU generations, as well as on Qualcomm Snapdragon X2 Series with Adreno integrated graphics. Later this month, Microsoft plans to extend ASD to Intel Arc B-Series, which includes B570, B580, Intel Core Ultra Series 2, and Intel Core Ultra Series 3. This update will coincide with support for all NVIDIA GeForce RTX GPUs and the RTX Spark platform, ensuring that every RTX-based GeForce system benefits from the speedup.
Microsoft demonstrated what ASD can do with early access to Gears of War: E-Day. Running ASD with Gears of War: E-Day showed that shader compilation time was reduced by 95%, as the game comes with pre-compiled shaders, with only a few compiled locally. Stuttering is also greatly reduced, but that is only a visual quality you can try out yourself. If you are playing early access of Gears of War: E-Day, let us know in the comments.
Unfortunately, in TPU's own testing, things weren't so convenient.
Sources:
Microsoft, via VideoCardz
Currently, ASD is claimed to work on AMD RDNA 1, RDNA 2, RDNA 3, RDNA 3.5, and RDNA 4 GPU generations, as well as on Qualcomm Snapdragon X2 Series with Adreno integrated graphics. Later this month, Microsoft plans to extend ASD to Intel Arc B-Series, which includes B570, B580, Intel Core Ultra Series 2, and Intel Core Ultra Series 3. This update will coincide with support for all NVIDIA GeForce RTX GPUs and the RTX Spark platform, ensuring that every RTX-based GeForce system benefits from the speedup.
Unfortunately, in TPU's own testing, things weren't so convenient.
There is supposed to be a fix for this shader compilation wait. Microsoft has been rolling out Advanced Shader Delivery, which downloads shaders from the cloud, the right ones for your hardware and driver combination, so that your PC doesn't have to build them. E-Day is one of the first titles meant to use it, but it didn't work for us. On NVIDIA that's expected for now, the drivers that support it aren't due until after launch. On AMD, it should already work, according to the game's reviewer's guide: the requirement is driver 26.7.1 or newer, and we tested on 26.9.2. The full 15 minute compile happened anyway.
27 Comments on Microsoft's Advanced Shader Delivery Arrives to NVIDIA GeForce RTX GPUs Later This Month
And then you update the driver and have do download it all over again!
I rather wait 1 min for my CPU to build them, thank you very much.
There are benchmarks out there that confirm 9800X3D is faster and would say around 2-5 minutes average time it will take.
10-15 minutes is not the norm and are very rarely the case on a fast processor. Maybe something like a 6 core AMD 2600 and before.
Maybe you don't understand the concept of average. Most games don't take that long!
We will just have to wait and see, as no one can say for sure what it will and won't do for now.
on none of these systems.
It normally takes, on average, 1-3 Minutes depending on Game.
There may be some Games that take longer, but 10-15 min?
Even The Last of US Part 1, which has a very aggressive shader compilation, takes like 4 min max.
It is just not a big deal, that is all i am saying.
Besides that, you can improve shader compilation a lot by doing it slower in the background while loading the next area, like TLoU Part 2 is doing it. You do not have to wait for shader compilation at all in that game, it is doing it while loading, so you wait like 5-10s longer to load into the Game for the first time.
Then again modern AAA gaming is being ruined by poor optimization and UE5 slop, this is a fix for a problem that shouldn't exist in the first place.
Installing a new driver, and that is all gone!
Now Downloading 80 Gigs again. and again, and again...
And now imagine, there are people that have to pay for every GB they download...
Also to address your earlier post... it's true you can do it but on-the-fly shader compilation introduces stuttering, no matter the hardware. Horizon games do this and stutter until it's done. Subnautica 2 is another example.
That’s still 10 minutes on a 9850X3D, which IS a lot, to be fair. Not 38, but still quite painful, and that’s not a UE game at all.
No hard feelings but it isn't BS 😉
Definition and Frequency
- Frequency: It describes an action that occurs roughly 80% to 90% of the time—more often than occasionally, but less strictly than always.
Yeah, NO... You are still wrong.The games that don't are obviously the easier to run ones like Marvel Rivals. If that's the kind of stuff you play and you're not affected, great!
Have you even stopped to think about it - if this truly wasn't an looming issue, would Microsoft have bothered? Valve has been distributing precompiled Vulkan shader files for years now, too.
And you also didn't think of people on lower end machines or handhelds where this problem is exacerbated even further.
I'm not wrong, it's just your feelings that got hurt for some reason.