Early access for Gears of War: E-Day has kicked off for anyone who bought the Premium Edition, and if you’re on PC, you’re probably dreading the traditional shader compilation wait that comes with it. There’s good news, as Gears of War: E-Day supports a neat feature on this platform that cuts down on that process significantly.
Called Advanced Shader Delivery (ASD), it addresses how modern games rely on shaders to calculate how light, shadows, reflections, and textures should look on screen. This usually involves you sitting for a while when you first boot up a game after installing it, resulting in the infamous “Compiling Shaders” loading bar. In comparison, ASD is like buying a Gundam model kit that’s already assembled, right out of the box.
ASD pre-translates and delivers shader files directly to your device ahead of time, so you wait mere seconds. It also works across a wide variety of systems, and while I haven’t installed Gears of War: E-Day on my main PC yet, I did load it up on my Asus Xbox ROG Ally X. The shader compilation waiting time was around 20 seconds, far better than waiting up to 15 minutes as I’ve experienced with other new games.
It’s also worth noting that ASD works with multiple hardware configurations, including devices powered by AMD, Intel, Nvidia, and Qualcomm. Gears of War: E-Day will be the first game to support ASD across Windows devices, and it’s currently available for users with AMD graphics cards. Owners of Nvidia GPUs will receive ASD-compatible drivers shortly after E-Day launches.
While our impression of the multiplayer portion of Gears of War: E-Day is still coming, the campaign is a mostly solid excuse to take cover and pop some Locust heads. “For better or worse, E-Day is distinctly Gears, and I had a good time with it, even if the story is disappointing and the open areas are fairly dull,” Richard Wakeling wrote in GameSpot’s Gears of War: E-Day review. “But that’s all it is: a good game, propped up by combat that hasn’t changed all that much over the past 20 years. That’s enough to skate by, but I wish Gears of War would dig deeper.”
