Microsoft recently announced that through its developed shader delivery technology "Advanced Shader Delivery", the shader compilation time of "Forza Horizon 6" has been significantly reduced to only 4 seconds. A preview version of this technology is open for testing on PC platforms equipped with AMD GPUs.
When playing a game, the system needs to compile "shaders" for screen rendering. Compiling on the fly every time during gameplay may result in performance degradation. Therefore, especially PC games, most of them adopt the design of centrally compiling shaders when they are first started. However, this process sometimes takes several minutes, and driver or game updates may trigger a recompilation. Many players are annoyed by the long wait every time they start the game.
To solve this problem, the Microsoft DirectX team developed "Advanced Shader Delivery". This technology creates pre-compiled shader databases (PSDB) by integrating shaders collected from various games and shader compilers obtained in cooperation with major hardware manufacturers. Players will get the database when they download the game from the store, so they can start playing immediately upon first launch.
The technology was released in August last year and was supported on the ROG Xbox Ally series of handheld consoles in October. It has been adapted to dozens of games, including "The Outer Worlds 2" and "Gears of War: Reloaded". Now, this technology has been extended to the PC platform, and "Forza Horizon 6", which opened early access on the same day, has become the latest supported work.
According to Microsoft, the traditional shader compilation method of "Forza Horizon 6" takes nearly 1 minute, but after using the new technology, it only takes 4 seconds, achieving a time reduction of about 95%, while also reducing lag during the game. The test model uses AMD Radeon RX 7600 GPU and AMD Ryzen 7 5800 CPU, which is a mid-range configuration from a few years ago. This means that even if you don't have a high-end PC, you can enjoy a huge increase in startup speed.
This feature is currently still in preview. To use it, you need to select "PC Gaming Preview" through the Xbox Insider Hub app to join the Xbox Insider program. The GPU must be RDNA 3rd generation or above architecture. Microsoft said that it will cooperate with various suppliers in the future to gradually expand the scope of support for the PC ecosystem, but at this stage it is only available for AMD graphics cards.
It is worth noting that NVIDIA has also released its own automatic shader compilation technology "Auto Shader Compilation" and will provide a beta version in NVIDIA applications starting in March this year. In addition, the Steam client has adopted the "Shader Pre-Caching" mechanism of sharing compiled shaders since around 2017. Major manufacturers are exploring ways to reduce the loading time before starting the game.