Windows 11 Advanced Shader Delivery Expands to NVIDIA, Intel and Qualcomm GPUs

Microsoft says Advanced Shader Delivery is expanding this month to additional Windows 11 devices powered by Intel, NVIDIA and Qualcomm. The technology delivers hardware-specific precompiled shaders with a game download so less shader compilation has to happen on the player's CPU at first launch or during play.

Gears of War: E-Day is the first title Microsoft is using to showcase the expanded hardware ecosystem. Microsoft says its Advanced Shader Delivery path cuts first-launch shader compilation time by approximately 95% in the game, from several minutes on a typical PC without ASD to a few seconds with it. That figure is Microsoft's measurement and should not be treated as an independent benchmark or a universal result for every game.

Microsoft lists Windows 11 24H2 or newer as the operating-system requirement. For Gears of War: E-Day, players also need the Xbox PC app installed before downloading the game so the precompiled shader package can be delivered through the supported path.

Hardware support alone does not make every PC game an ASD title. Developers must integrate the required State Object Database workflow and submit the shader data through the supported distribution pipeline. Microsoft says Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 4 is among the titles planned for future ASD support.

PC shader compilation is difficult to precompute because Windows games run across many GPU and driver combinations. Advanced Shader Delivery uses a State Object Database describing the game's graphics state and vendor compiler plugins to generate precompiled shader databases for compatible hardware.

The expansion is therefore primarily an infrastructure change: Microsoft's shader-delivery system is moving from an AMD-focused rollout toward a multi-vendor Windows ecosystem. It can reduce compilation-related waiting and stutter when a game participates, but it does not eliminate unrelated traversal, asset-streaming, CPU or GPU performance problems.