Microsoft's fix for PC shader compilation stutter could take years to fully implement
Microsoft has a fix for long shader compilation wait times. The system is called Advanced Shader Delivery, and it's being first introduced for ASUS ROG Xbox Ally handhelds and games listed on the Xbox app.
Just about every PC gamer knows the feeling of booting up a highly anticipated new AAA title, excited to explore its sprawling environments or open world, only to be hit with "compiling shaders" and a progress bar that seems to move at a snail's pace. Depending on what specs you're rocking and what game you've just installed, the wait could be as much as one to two hours for those with slower CPUs and older systems.
While it seems increasingly common that huge games are using these shader compilation screens before even getting to the main menu (looking at you Hogwarts Legacy), games that choose not to use them still need to load and compile shaders. If they aren't done ahead of time, then they must be done during gameplay, which can lead to in-game stuttering that many gamers are also familiar with.
Advanced Shader Delivery would preempt this by doing the entire compilation process ahead of time and storing those compiled shaders in the cloud. The catch is that shader compilation is hardware-specific, and since there are myriad GPU and driver combos, it would take a few dozen sets of compiled shaders to cover all the most common setups, and that's per game. Extrapolate that out even just to all the AAA titles released yearly, and you've got yourself a massive database.
This is similar to how shader compilation works on consoles, but you're talking about at most two or three versions per console, or even fewer in the case of the Nintendo Switch. In fact, that's precisely why Microsoft is starting with the ASUS ROG Xbox Ally handhelds, which comprises only two hardware configurations.
Microsoft's Agility SDK for game developers now supports Advanced Shader Delivery, meaning devs could start building it into new games already. In practice, it can take years to fully capitalize on new technologies like this.
That's exactly what we've seen with Direct Storage, another Microsoft technology meant to reduce asset load times. Three years after its release, we still see only a handful of big titles incorporating Direct Storage. It might be a long time before we see Advanced Shader Delivery incorporated into most popular games and available on different store fronts like Steam.This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/gaming/pc/microsofts-fix-for-pc-shader-compilation-stutter-could-take-years-to-fully-implement-183904449.html?src=rss
