In the era of speedy solid state drives, I barely remember the last time I saw a loading screen. I say ‘barely’ because it was, in fact, last night as I waited for Star Wars Zero Company to compile its shaders for a second time following a crash I encountered during the tutorial mission. Some of us are just blessed (read: cursed) like that. Thankfully, more and more games are moving towards pre-compiling shaders.
Case in point, Nvidia just released a fresh GeForce Game Ready Driver that adds support for Advanced Shader Delivery in both Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 4 and Gears of War: E-Day. I’ve not had a chance to test the Nvidia GeForce 621.01 WHQL driver yet, but journalist Sebastian Castellanos notes “considerably lower system RAM usage” with it installed.
He wrote on X, “In Gears of War: E-Day, [RAM usage is] about 7-8 GB lower in my case. CPU usage is still relatively high though.”
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To briefly recap, Advanced Shader Delivery is Microsoft tech that compiles a game’s shaders before you ever hit ‘play’, distributing them during the download process and banishing that pesky in-game load screen. This update brings support to all RTX GPUs, from the 20-series to the 50-series, but the tech is only available for certain games.
Back in May, Microsoft worked with AMD to get Advanced Shader Delivery support in a number of games—but only if you download them via the Xbox app. It’s the same story here, with Nvidia writing, “When you download or update a supported title, the exact Precompiled Shader Database (PSDB) tailored to your rig is bundled with your download via the Xbox PC app, meaning ASD-supported games purchased from the Microsoft Store will offer a seamless experience.”
(Image credit: Xbox Juegos Studios.)
“Pre-compiling every possible combination on the developer’s side would mean users download terabytes of data with each new game and update, leaving local compilation as the long-standing norm.” Nvidia goes on, “Microsoft’s new Advanced Shader Delivery solves this by offloading the heavy lifting to the cloud.”
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1. Best gaming laptop: Razer Blade 16
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3. Best handheld gaming PC: Asus ROG Xbox Ally X
4. Best mini PC: Minisforum AtomMan G7 PT
5. Best VR headset: Meta Quest 3
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