One of the most annoying things about PC games is how long they can take to start, thanks to the traditional shader compilation a game goes through after installation or after getting new drivers. The silver bullet to this might be Microsoft’s Advanced Shader Delivery, which was used in Gears of War: E-Day to drastically cut down on its initial launch, and Nvidia graphics card owners can also take advantage of this technology starting today with the release of the version 621.01 drivers. AMD has featured this technology for a while now, but with Nvidia included, ASD will be open to the vast majority of the PC gaming community.
Available for Nvidia RTX and RTX Spark graphics cards, ASD reduces shader compilation times by downloading precompiled shaders. For now, only two games support ASD–the new Gears of War prequel and Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 4. Combined with Nvidia’s Automatic Shader Compilation, which is designed to prevent shaders from needing to be recompiled after you install new drivers, this should make for a pretty seamless approach to installing a game and playing it right away, something which console owners have enjoyed for years. This is down to consoles only having one configuration, whereeas PCs come in multiple configurations, thus requiring shader compilation to set a game up on that platform.
In my own testing, ASD proved to be very quick on both my desktop PC and my Asus ROG Ally X. After installing Gears of War: E-Day, I could start the game in under a minute on either platform, a marked improvement compared to how some games asked me to wait around 10-15 minutes so that they could get their shader ducks in a row. ASD works with multiple hardware configurations, including devices powered by AMD, Intel, and Qualcomm, although results may vary between systems.
On the console side, Sony recently announced Quick Spectral Super Resolution for base PS5 consoles, and AMD has announced that FSR 4.1 is coming to Xbox Series X|S in the future.