Microsoft takes shader compilation to cloud

Microsoft is expanding Advanced Shader Delivery across Windows 11, giving more PC gamers a way around lengthy first-run shader compilation. ASD delivers precompiled shaders with a game instead of asking every PC to compile them locally. Microsoft says Gears of War: E-Day cuts first-launch shader compilation by about 95%, from several minutes to seconds. AMD and Qualcomm hardware support ASD now, while Intel and Nvidia support arrives later in October, substantially widening the available PC hardware base. 

Shader compilation has become an irritating side effect of increasingly complex PC graphics. Modern games contain large numbers of shaders that tell GPUs how to process materials, lighting, shadows, reflections, textures, and other rendering operations. The game must prepare those programs for the player’s hardware before the GPU can execute them.

Developers have several ways to handle that work. A game can compile shaders during its first launch,…