Microsoft Promises Smoother PC Gaming With New Shader Delivery System

Microsoft has unveiled a major update to its Windows gaming ecosystem aimed at reducing one of PC gaming’s most notorious frustrations – long load times and in-game stuttering caused by shader compilation.

The announcement came during Gamescom 2025 in Cologne, where the company also showcased new Asus ROG Xbox handheld devices. At the heart of the reveal was Advanced Shader Delivery (ASD), a new DirectX feature designed to make game launches faster and gameplay more fluid.

Tackling a long-standing problem

Shaders – small programs that handle effects like lighting, textures, and physics – must be compiled to run on a specific graphics card before players can dive into a game. This process often results in stutters, frozen frames, and painfully long startup times, even on high-end gaming PCs.

Microsoft says ASD addresses the issue by shifting much of the workload from the player’s machine to the cloud. Two technologies underpin the system: the State Object Database (SODB), which standardizes how games store data, and the Precompiled Shader Database (PSDB), a cache of shaders ready to download.

With ASD, games purchased through the Xbox Store can check which shaders are required and pull them directly from the PSDB before the player even starts the game. This means most shaders arrive precompiled, cutting out the performance hit from on-the-fly processing.

Dramatic performance gains

In testing with Obsidian Entertainment’s upcoming action RPG Avowed, Microsoft recorded launch times up to 85% faster when ASD was enabled. The company also claims the feature reduces battery drain by minimizing the time GPUs spend on heavy compilation tasks.

The approach resembles Valve’s shader cache for the Steam Deck, though Microsoft’s solution is designed to handle the diverse range of PC hardware. “We worked with our partners to take an expensive workload and move it into the cloud instead, so it’s ready at download time,” the DirectX team explained in a blog post.

Rollout and developer support

The technology will debut on the new ROG Xbox Ally and Ally X handhelds, with support limited initially to titles distributed through the Xbox Store. Microsoft plans to release an AgilitySDK next month, allowing developers and third-party platforms such as Steam to adopt the system.

If widely adopted, ASD could mark a turning point for shader-heavy triple-A games, easing one of the most persistent bottlenecks in PC gaming performance.