Microsoft will bring Advanced Shader Delivery to all NVIDIA RTX GPUs this month

Microsoft will extend Advanced Shader Delivery to all NVIDIA RTX GPUs later this month, bringing precompiled game shaders to a wider range of Windows PCs. The expansion also covers Intel Arc B-series graphics and selected Core Ultra chips. VideoCardz reported the change, which Microsoft’s DirectX announcement confirms.

Advanced Shader Delivery comes to all NVIDIA RTX GPUs

Advanced Shader Delivery (ASD) downloads GPU-specific, precompiled shaders with a supported game. That shifts work away from the first launch, when a PC would otherwise compile shaders locally and could leave players waiting or cause stutter as new effects appear. Microsoft says the system reduces shader work handled by the CPU at startup.

Microsoft is using Gears of War: E-Day as the first game to demonstrate ASD across the expanded Windows hardware lineup. The company says first-launch shader compilation in the game takes a few seconds with the feature, compared with several minutes on a typical PC without it — a reduction of about 95%, by Microsoft’s estimate.

That is a claim about shader compilation time in this game, not a promise of a 95% frame-rate increase. Players will need Windows 11 version 24H2 or newer, and Microsoft says to install the Xbox PC app before downloading E-Day to use ASD. Its PC requirements are separate from the new shader support.

The feature also needs game-level support. Microsoft’s developer documentation says studios collect a State Object Database and submit it alongside the game package, so adding GPU compatibility does not switch ASD on for every existing PC title.

Which GPUs and drivers are supported?

Microsoft’s October 1 announcement lists the hardware below. NVIDIA and Intel support is due later in October, and Microsoft has not published minimum driver versions for either platform yet.

“All RTX GPUs” is Microsoft’s wording; the announcement does not name individual RTX generations or provide a date more specific than later this month. The Arc list is similarly limited to the B570, B580 and Core Ultra Series 2 and 3. Intel’s separate Graphics Shader Distribution Service already delivers precompiled shaders to supported games on those products, as VideoCardz reported earlier this year.

This is not the same as NVIDIA Auto Shader Compilation

NVIDIA has its own Auto Shader Compilation feature in the NVIDIA app. That beta feature rebuilds DirectX 12 game shaders in the background, including after some driver updates, while Microsoft’s ASD distributes game- and hardware-specific precompiled shaders with a supported game download. They address related waits, but they are not the same system; NVIDIA’s feature does not mean a game supports Microsoft’s delivery pipeline.

The distinction for players is compatibility: a supported RTX card alone is not enough. The game must also ship ASD data, and Microsoft currently points to Gears of War: E-Day as the first title using it across the wider Windows hardware ecosystem. The company has also named Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 4 as a future supported game. E-Day uses NVIDIA graphics features too; tbreak has covered its DLSS 4.5 and ray-reconstruction support.

The best shader compilation screen is the one players see for less time. For now, the promised RTX expansion is about reducing the wait before play, rather than increasing a GPU’s rendering performance once a game is running.