Gears of War: E-Day Gets Boost from Microsoft's Advanced Shader Delivery

Microsoft has announced that Advanced Shader Delivery (ASD) is now available for Gears of War: E-Day on Windows 11. This feature allows players to avoid a multi-minute shader compile at first launch, reducing compilation time by approximately 95%. According to Microsoft, ASD addresses two problems: long first-launch waits and stutter caused by compiling shaders mid-game.

Precompiled shaders ship with the game download, reducing the workload of the player's CPU at startup. This means that players can enjoy a smoother gaming experience from the start. Microsoft says that shader compilation with ASD takes 'just a few seconds', compared to several minutes on a typical PC without it.

Gears of War: E-Day is the first game to support ASD across a wide set of Windows devices, including AMD RDNA graphics and Qualcomm Snapdragon X2 Series devices. Intel and NVIDIA systems will follow later this month. Microsoft invites studios to add ASD to their own games, providing documentation on GitHub that explains how to collect state object databases (SODB) and upload them for precompilation.