Microsoft is expanding its Advanced Shader Delivery (ASD)technology across Windows 11, with Gears of War: E-Day becoming the first game to support the feature across a broad range of AMD, NVIDIA, Intel, and Qualcomm-powered systems.
Advanced Shader Delivery is designed to address one of the more persistent issues affecting modern PC games: shader/Pipeline State Object (PSO) compilation. Instead of requiring the user’s CPU to compile large numbers of shaders during the game’s first launch — or just-in-time compiling them dynamically during gameplay — ASD allows precompiled shaders to be delivered alongside the game download. Microsoft says this can both significantly shorten first-launch compilation times and reduce shader compilation-related stutter during gameplay.
The company saysGears of War: E-Day demonstrates just how significant the improvement can be. On a typical PC without ASD, first-launch shader compilation can take several minutes. With Advanced Shader Delivery enabled, Microsoft says the process is reduced to just a few seconds, representing an approximately95% reduction in shader compilation time.
Support does come with a few requirements. Users need Windows 11 version 24H2 or newer, while AMD support currently covers GPUs based on RDNA 1, RDNA 2, RDNA 3, RDNA 3.5, and RDNA 4 architectures with Adrenalin 26.6.1 or later. Qualcomm Snapdragon X2 devices are also supported.
Microsoft says support will expand later this month to all NVIDIA RTX GPUs, including RTX Spark, alongside Intel Arc B570 and B580 GPUs as well as Core Ultra Series 2 and Series 3 integrated graphics chips. That should make ASD available across a substantially larger portion of the Windows 11 gaming ecosystem.
For Gears of War: E-Day, users will need to install the XBOX PC app before downloading the game to take advantage of ASD. When the feature is working correctly, the game’s launch window will display a “Precompiled shaders installed” message.
And Gears of War: E-Day is only the beginning. Microsoft has already confirmed that Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 4 will also support Advanced Shader Delivery in the future, with additional titles also planned.
If adoption becomes widespread — especially on other popular PC game stores such as Steam — ASD could provide Windows 11 with a system-level solution to one of PC gaming’s most frustrating recurring problems, particularly in titles that would otherwise rely heavily on runtime shader compilation.
About the author: Sebastian Castellanos is a data scientist by education and training. He’s also deeply passionate about PC gaming hardware and software. He has recently started writing technical articles and guides on Wccftech about PC hardware, games and mods.
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