No more waiting on shaders to compile as Nvidia's latest driver adds advanced shader delivery: users report lower RAM usage in Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 4 and Gears of War: E-Day

In the era of speedy solid state drives, I barely remember the last time I saw a loading screen. I say 'barely' because it was, in fact, last night as I waited for Star Wars Zero Company to compile its shaders for a second time following a crash I encountered during the tutorial mission. Some of us are just blessed (read: cursed) like that. Thankfully, more and more games are moving towards pre-compiling shaders.

Case in point, Nvidia just released a fresh GeForce Game Ready Driver that adds support for Advanced Shader Delivery in both Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 4 and Gears of War: E-Day. I've not had a chance to test the Nvidia GeForce 621.01 WHQL driver yet, but journalist Sebastian Castellanos notes "considerably lower system RAM usage" with it installed.

He wrote on X, "In Gears of War: E-Day, [RAM usage is] about 7-8 GB lower in my case. CPU usage is still relatively high though."

To briefly recap, Advanced Shader Delivery is Microsoft tech that compiles a game's shaders before you ever hit 'play', distributing them during the download process and banishing that pesky in-game load screen. This update brings support to all RTX GPUs, from the 20-series to the 50-series, but the tech is only available for certain games.

Back in May, Microsoft worked with AMD to get Advanced Shader Delivery support in a number of games—but only if you download them via the Xbox app. It's the same story here, with Nvidia writing, "When you download or update a supported title, the exact Precompiled Shader Database (PSDB) tailored to your rig is bundled with your download via the Xbox PC app, meaning ASD-supported games purchased from the Microsoft Store will offer a seamless experience."

Nvidia also breaks down why one cannot simply add Advanced Shader Delivery to every game, and why waiting around for a game to compile shaders is even a thing to begin with. "Modern games rely on tens of thousands of complex shaders," Nvidia explains, "However, generic shader files must be compiled locally into instructions specific to your GPU and driver version, which is a CPU-heavy process that forces players to wait up to 30 minutes every time a game launches or updates.

"Pre-compiling every possible combination on the developer’s side would mean users download terabytes of data with each new game and update, leaving local compilation as the long-standing norm." Nvidia goes on, "Microsoft’s new Advanced Shader Delivery solves this by offloading the heavy lifting to the cloud."