Advanced Shader Delivery is Now Available in Windows 11

Microsoft announced that Advanced Shader Delivery (ASD) is now generally available for videogames downloaded from the Xbox app or Microsoft Store in Windows 11. And it’s coming soon to the Epic Game Store and Steam, too.

“Advanced Shader Delivery is broadly available across the Windows ecosystem on devices powered by AMD, Intel, Nvidia, and Qualcomm,” Microsoft’s Wendy Ho explains. “ASD addresses a PC ecosystem-wide challenge by delivering shaders at the download of a title, reducing overall loading time, reducing shader stutter in game, and saving on power consumption.”

Having been stung by the need for modern AAA games to render shaders on first run and after a major update many, many times, I can’t tell you how exciting this is. The typical Call of Duty experience these days is that you install the game or an often-massive update to the game, which can take an hour or more, and then you have to wait up to 20 minutes when you run the game before you can play it because it has to render shaders.

With ASD, this should be a thing of the past: Instead of taking several minutes to render shaders, this process takes just a few seconds so you can start playing immediately.

ASD is a feature of DirectX that dates back to late 2025 and the debut of the ROG Xbox Ally gaming handhelds. At that time, XBOX and AMD–which makes the processor and graphics chipset in the gaming handhelds–partnered to precompile the shader data and distribute it to devices when a compatible game was downloaded. Which was only part of the problem: ASD only worked with “key” gaming titles. In the good news department, it worked with any game downloaded from the XBOX app, including those you acquired from other stores like Steam.

With today’s update, however, ASD should be available broadly on any Windows 11 PC with AMD RDNA, Intel Arc B570 or B580 GPUs on Core Ultra Series 2 or Series 3 processors, all Nvidia RTX GPUs, RTX Spark computers, or Qualcomm Snapdragon X2 processors, each of which requires the latest drivers.

As before, you have to install the game from the XBOX app for ASD to work, and this includes games acquired from other stores (because the XBOX app integrates with third-party stores). But Epic Games and Steam will soon support ASD directly, too.