Nvidia says Advanced Shader Delivery can allow supported games to skip local shader compilation altogether, while Microsoft says the technology can also reduce the dreaded shader compilation stutters that have plagued major PC releases for years.
And man, have they been harassed.
In 2023, we lamented the miserable state of PC ports after the prophesied, dead space, The last of us Part Iand Star Wars Jedi: Survivor They all came with various performance issues. Notable among them were stutters in shader compilation and traversal, and we spent a lot of time complaining about the issue in The complete nerd. Modern Unreal Engine games have become especially notorious for their stuttering, thanks to an ugly combination of shader compilation and separate asset traversal or streaming issues. the last of us was particularly brutal: players waited up to an hour for shaders to compile, hitting even powerful CPUs in the process.
The problem is central to PC gaming’s greatest strength: hardware diversity. Shaders must be compiled for your particular combination of game, GPU, and graphics driver. While developers can build them from scratch on consoles because each Xbox has fixed, known hardware, PCs are the gaming equivalent of the Wild West.
Advanced Shader Delivery essentially attempts to give PCs the same console-like advantage without sacrificing flexibility. Developers capture shader information in a standardized state object database, while Microsoft combines that data with cloud hardware vendors’ shader compilers to generate a precompiled shader database tailored to their hardware. Windows can then receive those shaders ready to run instead of having your CPU use them locally. And after a driver update, Microsoft says the shader cache can be updated automatically.
Microsoft first introduced Advanced Shader Delivery last year for ROG Xbox Ally laptops and then expanded it to a broader range of AMD-powered PCs this summer. Bringing Nvidia on board is a significant step in making this intriguing Xbox-PC feature available to more PC gamers. Nvidia claims that Advanced Shader Delivery can achieve a nearly 100 percent shader cache hit rate in supported games. Skipping a long shader compilation screen is certainly welcome, but preventing shaders from compiling just in time while you’re playing (boosting your CPU and causing a fast game to suddenly stop) could ultimately be a much bigger win for your overall gaming experience.
