Gamers definitely know the experience: You want to launch a game, but it starts to compile shaders, which can take several minutes. The reason is that shaders have to be built from code specifically for your hardware. And the compilation must be repeated after every GPU driver update, so you can end up seeing this waiting screen quite frequently. But Windows is now getting an improvement that should largely eliminate this waiting.
Last autumn, Microsoft announced a new feature for the DirectX ecosystem called Advanced Shader Delivery. This works by no longer compiling shaders on the device itself, but instead making them available on cloud servers. The game downloads them on startup and the annoying local compilation and waiting screen are skipped.
With today’s fast internet connections, this should be much faster, often perhaps practically unnoticeable compared to compilation, which can take several minutes—the fewer CPU cores and threads your processor has, the longer it can take. It can be a fairly demanding task; after all, two years ago it was actually shader compilation in some games what exposed the degradation and instability issues of Raptor Lake processors.
Microsoft cites an example where the first launch (after installation or a GPU driver update) of Forza Horizon 6 is shortened by up to 95% (measured on a PC with a Radeon RX 7600 graphics card and an AMD Ryzen 7 5800 processor—which is a 65W OEM model and potentially somewhat slower than the more common 5800X). While the first launch with CPU-side compilation took almost 1.5 minutes in testing, with Advanced Shader Delivery the game started in 4 seconds.
Shaders are compiled locally on the device (PC) because they are usually tied specifically to the driver version, but also to the particular GPU architecture. However, it is possible to compile them in advance and place them on servers for the most popular combinations of drivers (especially current ones) and GPU configurations. This principle has traditionally been used by consoles (and Valve’s Steam Deck), which have low or even zero hardware variability. Advanced Shader Delivery brings this approach to Windows gaming PCs as well.
Since its release in October, Advanced Shader Delivery had been limited only to ROG Xbox Ally gaming handhelds. These devices use Ryzen processors and integrated AMD Radeon graphics, and now the infrastructure for downloading shaders is being expanded to standard AMD Radeon graphics cards as well. Thanks to this, larger groups of users will be able to take advantage of Advanced Shader Delivery.
For RDNA 3.x and RDNA 4, currently in preview
Support for Advanced Shader Delivery is now arriving for Radeon RX 7000 and RX 9000 graphics cards and the RDNA 3 and RDNA 4 architectures, as well as integrated GPUs based on RDNA 3 and RDNA 3.5, in conjunction with the new AMD Adrenalin 26.5.2 driver. It will probably be most useful for handhelds with integrated GPUs, since their lower-performance and power-efficient CPUs naturally take longer to compile shaders.
This is currently a preview version of the feature, so you won’t get it automatically. In addition to Windows 11 24H2 or newer system, you also need to install the Xbox Insider Hub application from the Microsoft Store and enroll in preview testing there. You also need Xbox Gaming Services version 37.113.11003.0 or newer (the update for this component can be triggered in the Microsoft Store after completing the previous step).
Advanced Shader Delivery can currently be used only in selected DirectX games. Developer cooperation is required, so it seems this feature still cannot be enabled globally, at least for now. Microsoft provides integration tools and support in the Agility SDK. A partial list of supported games can be found below (though this is a list from October 2025, and now it additionally includes at least the aforementioned Forza Horizon 6 game).
- Ark Survival Ascended
- Avowed
- Call of Duty: Black Ops 6
- Clair Obscur: Expedition 33
- Control
- Dead Island 2
- Deep Rock Galactic
- Farming Simulator 25
- Forspoken
- Final Fantasy XVI
- Forza Horizon 5
- Forza Horizon 6 [announced May 2026]
- Forza Motorsport
- Gears of War: Reloaded
- Gears Tactics
- Grounded 2
- Grand Theft Auto V Enhanced
- Lies of P
- Metro Exodus
- Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024
- Monster Hunter Rise
- Persona 3 Reload
- Resident Evil 2 (2019)
- Resident Evil 3
- S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2: Heart of Chornobyl
- Sea of Thieves
- Sniper Elite: Resistance
- South of Midnight
- The Elder Scrolls: Oblivion Remaster
- Ninja Gaiden 4
- The Callisto Protocol
- The Outer Worlds 2
- Silent Hill f
- Keeper
- Hogwarts Legacy
Probably the biggest limitation of the technology right now is that it is tied to the Xbox ecosystem and Microsoft Store (including the Game Pass subscription). It therefore works only with versions of games obtained through this channel, not with games from Epic Games Store, GOG, or Steam. This should not be a permanent limitation, because Microsoft previously announced that support for other stores would be added later. Most of your games are probably from those platforms, so for now you still won’t be able to take advantage of Advanced Shader Delivery.
Advanced Shader Delivery from other GPU manufacturers?
Radeon graphics cards and the earlier ROG Xbox Ally handhelds will not be the only hardware on the Windows platform to support—or eventually support—Advanced Shader Delivery.
Intel announced plans to support Advanced Shader Delivery several months ago, although it is expected to deploy the feature sometime later this year. However, in March the company added a similar precompiled shader download feature in version 101.8626 drivers for Intel Arc graphics cards. But this should instead apply only to selected Steam games (the list valid in March is available here) and appears to be a different feature. Intel does plan to add actual Advanced Shader Delivery support later, presumably in a similar fashion to how it now functions on Radeon GPUs. The aforementioned precompiled shader downloads within Steam platfrom are supported on Arc B580 and B570 graphics cards (Battlemage generation) and on integrated GPUs in Core Ultra 200 “Lunar Lake” and Core Ultra 300 “Panther Lake” processors, but not on first-generation Arc cards (the A-series). Similarly to AMD, only newer GPU architectures currently support it. It is possible that Advanced Shader Delivery will likewise only be supported on Battlemage/Xe2 and newer architectures.
According to earlier information from Microsoft, Qualcomm is also expected to eventually add support for its Snapdragon X2 processors (again, meaning support only for a newer generation, at least for now). Nvidia also plans to add support to their GPU drivers, but only sometime in the second half of the year. Which architectures will be supported is not yet certain. Nvidia states that GeForce RTX cards will receive support (which could mean all cards since the RTX 2000 generation, but this has not been explicitly confirmed yet).
However, Nvidia recently introduced a feature called Automatic Shader Compilation. But this does something different—shaders are still compiled on your computer, just in the background. This means they are compiled immediately after a GPU driver update rather than during the next launch of a game or games. However, this solution does not speed up the very first launch of a game after installation, as the initial compilation still has to be performed by the game itself. And if you want to launch your favorite game immediately after a GPU driver update finishes, it also won’t help—you will still have to wait for compilation. In this situation, Advanced Shader Delivery would provide an advantage.
Sources: Microsoft, VideoCardz
English translation and edit by Jozef Dudáš
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