Last October, we released Advanced Shader Delivery (ASD) on the ROG Xbox Ally handhelds. Advanced Shader Delivery addresses one of the most frustrating challenges for PC players today – long load times and disruptive stuttering during a game’s first launch. The feature works by delivering precompiled shaders to your game at download time, reducing load time by up to 90% and eliminating shader stutter.
Since the launch of the ROG Xbox Ally handhelds, we’ve partnered with AMD to invest in and improve the experience of players on PC. Today, Advanced Shader Delivery expands beyond ROG Xbox Ally handhelds to Windows 11 PCs with discrete GPUs and gaming laptop integrated GPUs from AMD. Players can take advantage of this preview by joining Xbox Insiders.
This expansion includes Forza Horizon 6, which showcases the advantage of ASD by dramatically improving loading times by 95%. We partnered closely with the team behind Forza Horizon 6 to give more players the advantage of ASD on day one.
Expanded experience:
With ASD, this loading screen finishes 95% faster on an AMD Radeon ™ RX 9060 GPU
Today marks the release of Forza Horizon 6. With advanced shader delivery, Forza Horizon 6 loads in 4 seconds, as compared to almost 1.5 minutes – that’s an overall 95% time savings! This measurement was taken on an AMD Radeon RX 7600 GPU and an AMD Ryzen ™ 7 5800 8-Core processor CPU. ASD also reduces shader stutter when playing the title by circumventing just in time compilation of shaders during gameplay.
Forza Horizon 6 is a great title available in the Xbox PC app that showcases the benefits of ASD, loading instantly and with no shader stutter!
Check out our announcement from the ROG Xbox Ally and Ally X release that details other titles that support ASD and are available in the Xbox PC app.
Device Requirements:
To experience Advanced Shader Delivery at launch, you need the following minimum specs:
Xbox Gaming Services: 37.113.11003.0 or higher (Microsoft Store > Library > Update Gaming Services)
Xbox Insider Hub: Open Xbox Insider Hub > Select Previews > PC Gaming Preview
GPU: AMD RDNA ™ 3, RDNA 3.5, RDNA 4 architectures
Driver: Adrenalin 26.5.2 or higher
‘Precompiled shaders installed’ will appear in the launch window when Advanced Shader Delivery is working
Call to Action: Bringing ASD to more titles
If you are a game developer interested in lighting up Advanced Shader Delivery for your own title, this blog post details how you can leverage the latest AgilitySDK to take advantage of the benefits of ASD. You can upload your title with a state object database (SODB) to the Xbox Partner Center to support pre-compilation for your title today.
What’s coming next?
In the coming months, we will be enabling ASD on more Windows devices and other IHV hardware. Stay tuned for more information on our blog.
Feedback?
For feedback on the Advanced Shader Delivery experience, you can let us know via our DirectX Discord.
On Linux we have this since years in Steam. It works for every game and almost all GPUs instead of needing explicit support.
They do it by hooks in a Vulkan Layer which intercepts the shader load / compilation calls and then either delivers pre compiled shaders it downloaded from steam or even pre-compiles shader on your PC if you update your GPU driver, as it remembered the shader source code.
This here sounds like it will require explicit support by the game developer, is limited to specific GPUs and so on :(.
I’m pretty sure they would have mentioned it in the article if Steam had done the (significant) amount of work needed to integrate Advanced Shader Delivery into their storefront. So I guess it’s only the Xbox version for now.
Yeah. This is just a preview and not a full rollout. Hopefully Steam/EGS support is coming as well. Steam has already implemented a method of collecting and distributing shaders for Vulkan called Fossilize.. so I'd imagine they'd want to support this as well for DirectX. With all this effort between Microsoft, IHVs, Storefronts, and developers.. I would assume that most are onboard with doing it. The tools are out there now, so it's essentially on the storefronts to implement their own take on it.
As a sidenote, I'd like the option of being able to choose...
Does this only work for the Xbox app version of Forza Horizon or does this also work for the steam version as well?