Nvidia says its GeForce Game Ready 621.01 WHQL driver adds Microsoft’s Advanced Shader Delivery for supported games across the GeForce RTX lineup. The release belongs to the R620 driver branch, and Nvidia identifies Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 4 and Gears of War: E-Day as supported titles.
The technology delivers shaders compiled for compatible graphics hardware and drivers alongside a game download. Microsoft says this reduces compilation work on the player’s CPU, shortening first-launch waits and reducing stutter caused by compiling shaders during gameplay.
Nvidia says supported games can bypass shader-compilation screens and claims a shader-cache hit rate approaching 100 percent. Separately, Microsoft claims Advanced Shader Delivery reduces first-launch shader-compilation time in Gears of War: E-Day by approximately 95 percent, from several minutes to a few seconds. These figures describe shader preparation rather than overall game performance.
Hardware and storefront requirements
Microsoft lists all RTX GPUs and RTX Spark as supported with Nvidia driver 621.01 or later. Advanced Shader Delivery requires Windows 11 version 24H2 or later, compatible graphics drivers, a supported game and storefront integration. Microsoft’s broader rollout also covers specified AMD, Intel and Qualcomm hardware.
Nvidia describes matching shader databases arriving through the Xbox PC app with supported games purchased from the Microsoft Store. Microsoft says the app must be installed before downloading Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 4 or Gears of War: E-Day to use the feature.
Microsoft has announced plans to expand Advanced Shader Delivery to Steam and the Epic Games Store. Its announcement describes those expansions as coming soon without providing a launch date. Epic Games’ Unreal Engine documentation gives a more specific planning window for the Epic Games Store: early 2027. Microsoft also says Fortnite will receive support in an upcoming update.
Hardware editor Sam said the shader-compilation stage in the Xbox app version of Gears of War: E-Day finished within seconds in a test using a GeForce RTX 4080. Sam said his Steam copy could take upwards of 10 minutes on his system and that the effect on gameplay stutter needed further testing.
How precompiled shaders reach a PC
Shaders are programs used by a GPU for tasks such as lighting and texturing. They must be compiled into instructions suitable for the game, graphics hardware and driver, so a compiled shader cache cannot simply be shared interchangeably across all PCs.
Microsoft’s tools collect shader information and associated graphics pipeline state into a State Object Database, or SODB. Hardware vendors provide compilers that turn those inputs into a Precompiled Shader Database, or PSDB, for a supported GPU family and driver. Microsoft says its cloud infrastructure performs that preparation, allowing the matching database to be distributed with the game and used through the Windows shader cache.
Graphics driver updates can invalidate existing shader caches. Microsoft says its delivery system detects driver changes and updates the prepared shaders automatically. That process depends on a matching database being available for the configuration.
Epic Games’ Unreal Engine documentation explains that the driver can load a pipeline state from an installed PSDB instead of compiling it. Missing entries are compiled normally. Epic recommends retaining pipeline-state precaching to cover missing entries and reduce hitches when loading prepared shaders from disk.
Epic also notes that stores provide databases for supported GPU families and a limited set of recent drivers. Its documented Unreal Engine integration does not support ray-tracing pipeline states. Microsoft’s integration guide identifies differences in hardware, graphics settings and captured gameplay as reasons a database may not cover every pipeline a game uses.
Those limits qualify Nvidia’s near-100-percent cache-hit claim. Prepared shaders can reduce compilation work, but that does not establish that unrelated asset-streaming delays, traversal hitches or other CPU bottlenecks have been resolved.
Expansion beyond Xbox handhelds
Advanced Shader Delivery launched on the ROG Xbox Ally and ROG Xbox Ally X in October 2025. Microsoft subsequently expanded the technology beyond those handhelds.
An AMD public preview followed in May 2026. In a June 11, 2026, update, Microsoft said availability had expanded beyond Xbox Insiders to the Xbox PC app generally, with support across AMD’s RDNA graphics architecture family.
Microsoft’s subsequent Gears of War: E-Day announcement outlined expansion to Intel, Nvidia and Qualcomm devices, with Intel and Nvidia availability planned for later in that rollout. Its broader availability announcement lists supported hardware and driver versions across all four vendors.
