Nvidia and Microsoft want to kill PC gaming’s shader-stutter nightmare

Nvidia says Advanced Shader Delivery can let supported games skip local shader compilation entirely, while Microsoft says the technology can also reduce the dreaded shader-compilation stutters that have plagued major PC releases for years.

And man, have they plagued them.

Back in 2023, we lamented the miserable state of PC ports after Forspoken, Dead Space, The Last of Us Part I, and Star Wars Jedi: Survivor all arrived with various performance headaches. Shader compilation and traversal stutters were prominent among them, and we spent plenty of time complaining about the problem on The Full Nerd. Modern Unreal Engine games have become especially notorious for stuttering, thanks to some ugly combination of shader compilation and separate traversal or asset-streaming hitches. The Last of Us was particularly brutal: players waited up to an hour for shaders to compile, hammering even mighty CPUs in the process.

The problem is fundamental to PC gaming’s greatest strength: hardware diversity. Shaders need to be compiled for your particular combination of game, GPU, and graphics driver. Whereas developers can compile them up front on consoles because every Xbox has fixed, known hardware, PCs are the gaming equivalent of the Wild West.

Advanced Shader Delivery essentially tries to give PCs that same console-like advantage without sacrificing flexibility. Developers capture shader information in a standardized State Object Database, while Microsoft combines that data with hardware vendors’ shader compilers in the cloud to generate a Precompiled Shader Database tailored to your hardware. Windows can then receive those ready-to-run shaders rather than making your CPU crunch through them locally. And after a driver update, Microsoft says the shader cache can be updated automatically. 

Microsoft first unveiled Advanced Shader Delivery last year for the ROG Xbox Ally handhelds, then expanded it to a wider range of AMD-powered PCs this summer. Bringing Nvidia into the fold is a meaningful step towards making this intriguing Xbox-PC feature available to more PC gamers. Nvidia claims Advanced Shader Delivery can achieve nearly 100 percent shader-cache hit rate in supported games. Skipping a lengthy shader-compilation screen is certainly welcome, but preventing shaders from compiling just-in-time while you’re actually playing—spiking your CPU and making a fast game suddenly hitch—could ultimately prove to be a much bigger win for your overall gaming experience.