Nvidia’s New GeForce Driver Adds Advanced Shader Delivery, Tackling One of PC Gaming’s Oldest Headaches
Nvidia has released a new GeForce Game Ready Driver, version 621.01, that finally brings Microsoft’s Advanced Shader Delivery (ASD) to RTX graphics cards. The technology is designed to eliminate the long shader compilation waits PC gamers have put up with for decades, and it has already been available on AMD hardware with Adrenalin 26.6.1 or higher for a while. With Nvidia now on board too, ASD is open to the vast majority of the PC gaming community, starting with two games, Gears of War: E-Day and Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 4.
What Advanced Shader Delivery Actually Fixes
Shaders have been part of PC gaming since Nvidia’s GeForce 3 introduced pixel shaders back in 2001, but modern games now rely on tens of thousands of them. The catch is that generic shader files have to be compiled locally into instructions specific to each player’s exact GPU and driver version, a CPU-heavy process that can force players to wait up to 30 minutes every time a game launches or updates. Precompiling every possible hardware combination on the developer’s side isn’t realistic either, since it would mean downloading terabytes of data with each patch, which is why local compilation has remained the norm for so long.
Microsoft’s Advanced Shader Delivery solves this by offloading the heavy lifting to the cloud. Using DirectX 12, Windows 11 and the Microsoft Agility SDK, developers capture a game’s shaders into a State Object Database, which Microsoft’s cloud network then precompiles for hundreds of thousands of hardware and driver combinations. When a supported game is downloaded or updated, the exact Precompiled Shader Database tailored to that specific rig gets bundled in automatically through the Xbox PC app, a system that works even for copies bought on Steam, as long as the Xbox PC app is installed. As Nvidia puts it, the result simply “lets you skip the compilation screen entirely.”
Which Games Support It Right Now
Right now, only two titles take advantage of ASD, Gears of War: E-Day, which Gamersuniverse reviewed shortly after launch and which already shipped with AMD-side ASD support before Nvidia’s driver caught up, and Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 4, whose best PC settings Gamersuniverse covered here ahead of its October 23 full launch. GameSpot’s hands-on testing found the difference dramatic, starting Gears of War: E-Day in under a minute with ASD enabled on both a desktop PC and a ROG Ally X, compared to some games previously demanding 10 to 15 minutes of shader compilation on first boot. Combined with Nvidia’s separate Automatic Shader Compilation feature, which prevents shaders from needing to recompile after a driver update, the near-100 percent cache hit rate of ASD is also meant to wipe out the CPU spikes and mid-game stutter that used to come from “just-in-time” shader compiling.
Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 4 is one of only two launch titles for Advanced Shader Delivery so far, alongside Gears of War: E-Day.
How to Get It
Advanced Shader Delivery support is available now for GeForce RTX and RTX Spark graphics cards through the 621.01 Game Ready Driver, downloadable via the NVIDIA app or directly from Nvidia’s website. It requires Windows 11 24H2 or later, and since the precompiled shader packages are delivered through the Xbox PC app, that app needs to be installed even if a supported game was bought elsewhere, like on Steam. Nvidia says ASD works across multiple hardware configurations, including systems built around AMD, Intel and Qualcomm components, though results may vary by setup. More games are expected to pick up support over time, following the same path that brought DLSS 4.5 to titles like Cyberpunk 2077 and Planet Zoo 2 this week.
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Picture Source: NVIDIA, Activision (Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 4)
