One of the most frustrating issues with PC gaming is long startup times, primarily due to traditional shader compilation required after installing or updating drivers. Microsoft's Advanced Shader Delivery (ASD) technology may solve this problem. The technology was previously used in Gears of War: E-Day, significantly reducing the game's initial launch time.
Starting today, with the release of driver version 621.01, NVIDIA graphics card users can also experience this technology. AMD has long offered this feature, but with NVIDIA's adoption, ASD will benefit the vast majority of PC gamers.
ASD (Automatic Shader Compilation) is designed for NVIDIA RTX and RTX Spark graphics cards. It reduces shader compilation time by downloading pre-compiled shaders.
Currently, only two games support ASD—Gears of War: E-Day and Call of Duty: Modern Warfare III. Combined with NVIDIA's automatic shader compilation feature (which aims to prevent the need to recompile shaders after installing new drivers), this will make the process of installing and immediately playing games much smoother.
Console players have enjoyed this experience for years. This is because consoles have only one hardware configuration, whereas PCs come in many varieties, requiring shader compilation to install games across different platforms.
In my own tests, ASD performed extremely fast on both my desktop and the ASUS ROG Ally X. After installing Gears of War: E-Day, I was able to launch the game in under a minute on both platforms—a significant improvement compared to some games that require 10–15 minutes of waiting for shader rendering to complete.
ASD supports a variety of hardware configurations, including platforms from AMD, Intel, and Qualcomm, though actual performance may vary depending on the system.
On the console front, Sony recently announced that the base PS5 model will support Quick Spectral Super Resolution technology, while AMD also announced that FSR 4.1 technology will come to Xbox Series X|S in the future.