Microsoft and AMD have officially extended support for the new DirectX ASD technology to a large number of Radeon graphics cards, and the first results seem almost unbelievable. A new feature called Advanced Shader Delivery now supports the complete series of Radeon RX 7000, RX 8000 and RX 9000 graphics cards based on the RDNA 3, RDNA 3.5 and RDNA 4 architectures.
The essence of the technology is that “shaders” are no longer compiled during gameplay, but are downloaded in advance and delivered together with the game. In this way, Windows and GPU drivers avoid classic “runtime shader” compiling, which for years has caused huge pauses, micro-chopping and very long loading of modern AAA games.
Microsoft is eliminating the shader compilation process
According to Microsoft tests, Forza Horizon 6 on a PC with a Radeon RX 7600 graphics card and a Ryzen 7 5800 processor reduced its load time from nearly 90 seconds to just 4 seconds. This represents an acceleration of as much as 95%, while shader freezes during gameplay are practically completely eliminated.
The technology is currently supported by AMD, NVIDIA and Intel graphics cards, as ASD was developed jointly between the Xbox and DirectX teams.
Feature activation currently requires Windows 11 24H2 build or later, Xbox Gaming Services 37.113.11003.0 or later, membership in the Xbox Insider PC Gaming Preview program, and AMD Adrenaline 26.5.2 driver or later.
DirectX ASD technology is currently only supported by Forza Horizon 6 and 007: First Light, but Microsoft says that support will be coming to many more Windows games and hardware platforms in the coming months.
This rather useful technology has the potential to be massively expanded, and ASD could become one of the biggest DirectX changes in recent years because it solves one of the most annoying problems of modern PC gaming: “shader stuttering” and extremely long game loading times.