The PC is the best platform for games; there’s no denying it. However, PC ports are often plagued by some of the most bizarre technical issues, especially with modern “Triple-A” releases. From driver-related crashes to microstutters, almost every other PC port comes out with a plethora of issues right out of the box.

Bonus points if it’s an Unreal Engine 5 game.

Chief among these issues, and a personal pet peeve of mine when it comes to PC gaming, is the dreaded shader compilation stutters. However, Nvidia’s latest driver update might finally offer the quintessential fix for this issue that has plagued PC ports for years, albeit with a major caveat.

Advanced Shader Delivery is a potent fix for shader compilation stutters

However, its use case is fairly limited

Advanced Shader Delivery (ASD) isn’t an Nvidia-specific feature. Microsoft ideated it in 2025 to streamline shader compilation across their handheld Xbox PCs, i.e., the Xbox ROG Ally X and its future iterations. ASD essentially acts as an intermediary between the game’s files and the shaders needed to communicate with the GPU. Every game needs to compile shaders based on the GPU hardware and driver before it can render things like lighting, textures, physics, and more.

In DirectX 10 and 11 games, shader compilation used to be asynchronous. This essentially means that shaders were compiled in the background as the game rendered a cutscene or gameplay sequence.

Asynchronous shader compilation worked for DX11 games because they still mostly relied on rasterized lighting, which doesn’t require much shader data. However, most modern DirectX 12 games ship with ray-tracing and similar tech for lighting and global illumination. Shaders for those technologies are significantly larger and take more time to compile.

Add improved physics and technologies like Lumen, Nanite, and Virtual Shadow Maps, and shader compilation times can balloon to 15–30 minutes on mid-range CPUs.

To help with this, ASD essentially offloads the shader data as part of the game’s download. Since shaders are tied to the GPU and video drivers, Microsoft has essentially devised a method to package shader data based on specific GPUs into a new standardized format called State Object Database (SODB).

It delivers the SODB to the user as they download a game, essentially eliminating any waiting that the end-user has to do in order to compile the shaders. As soon as a game is downloaded, it can be played without any additional downtime. As a result, it also eliminates shader-related stutters.

Credit: Suman Biswas/MUO

However, there’s a caveat to how ASD works. Currently, ASD is supported by only a few Xbox Game Studios-published games, and only via the Microsoft Store. Yeah, if you don’t use the Microsoft Store or Xbox Game Pass for your PC games, you’re out of luck when it comes to benefiting from ASD.

That said, Microsoft has confirmed that ASD will be made open for use within DirectX 12’s Agility SDK. This means any third-party storefront, such as Steam or Epic Games Store, can eventually work ASD into their own library of DX12-supported games.

Advanced Shader Delivery is a boon for handheld PCs

If you don’t mind the Xbox ecosystem

While ASD benefits every gaming PC under the sun, it’s most beneficial to systems with lower-end CPUs or APUs, such as handheld PCs. Since ASD eliminates the need to ping the CPU to compile shader data, it frees a ton of additional CPU resources for the game’s rendering and geometry. The biggest impact of this can be seen in games like Forza Horizon 6, which is very CPU-heavy owing to its open-world systems and seamless map.

However, you’re once again limited to Windows-based handhelds and the Xbox/Microsoft Store if you want to use ASD. That said, you aren’t entirely out of luck if you own a Steam Deck. Dual-booting Windows on a Steam Deck is quite easy.

That said, even Steam has its own version of “shader pre-caching,” which aims to eliminate shader compilation stutters. Although it’s limited to very few games, such as Cyberpunk 2077, The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt — Remastered, Doom: The Dark Ages, etc., it’s just as effective as Microsoft’s ASD. And yes, it works on Steam Deck as well as Steam OS.

So, there are still plenty of reasons to switch to Steam OS on your PC handheld, even if doing so robs you of ASD.

We might never get a true solution to shader compilation stutters

Credit: Suman Biswas/MUO

As games grow more ambitious with their tech, we’ll eventually have to contend with bigger shader compilation-related issues. Recently, I was extremely excited to play Phantom Blade Zero, a game that I’ve been following for multiple years since its initial announcement. However, when I first booted up the game, I was greeted with what is easily the longest shader compilation process ever, taking upwards of 30 minutes to conclude.

And even then, the game exhibited frequent microstutters, and you guessed it, most of them were due to incomplete shader compilation. Microstutters in PC games have always been a major issue.

However, it generally used to be relegated to specific engines like Unreal Engine 3, earlier iterations of the CryEngine, etc. But lately, it seems almost every other PC port is plagued with microstutters and shader compilation issues, regardless of the underlying tech. At this point, I’m almost always expecting to go through a few hours of troubleshooting to get every new PC release running just right.

While it’s really great to see Microsoft and Nvidia finally working towards a possible fix for shader-related stutters, it’s still far from a true solution.