Shady Tactics: A year after Microsoft first introduced the feature, Advanced Shader Delivery is now expanding to popular game engines and digital storefronts. Thanks to ASD, PC gaming could eventually achieve parity with dedicated consoles in terms of performance consistency and predictability.
Epic recently updated the official documentation for Unreal Engine 5.x, introducing a potentially significant change to how the popular game engine handles shader compilation and the associated stuttering issues. Thanks to a new built-in, command-line tool, UE 5.8 will offer native support for Microsoft's Advanced Shader Delivery (ASD) technology.
Shader compilation stutter is one of the worst problems affecting modern PC gaming, and Unreal Engine 5 is particularly notorious for making matters worse. Microsoft's ASD aims to address the problem by moving parts of the shader compilation workload away from local PCs and introducing two technologies: the State Object Database (SODB) and the Precompiled Shader Database (PSDB). SODB provides a standardized format for storing game data, while PSDB serves as a remote cache of precompiled shaders.
Unreal Engine's new documentation explains that shaders are typically compiled when a Direct3D 12 game is launched for the first time. The GPU driver compiles shaders into GPU-specific code, while the game creates Pipeline State Objects (PSOs) that store the state required to configure the GPU's rendering pipeline.
The ASD Tool, new software included with UE 5.8, can generate an SODB from a "cooked" Windows game build. Each SODB contains shader and PSO data for a specific game build. Third-party digital storefronts can then use these databases to compile and distribute shader data for multiple supported GPU families and driver versions.
This multi-step process could significantly reduce shader compilation stutter, although ASD Tool currently supports only Direct3D 12 games that use Shader Model 6. Ray-tracing PSOs are not supported, and developers will need to generate updated SODBs whenever a new game build introduces changes to its shaders.
Epic also warns that ASD and ASD Tool are intended to complement existing Unreal Engine features, including PSO precaching and bundled PSO caches. Both are designed to mitigate shader compilation stutter, and Epic recommends that developers keep PSO caching enabled even after adopting ASD Tool. In other words, there is no silver bullet for stuttering just yet.
Game studios can already submit their compiled SODBs to the Microsoft Store, while support for Steam and the Epic Games Store is expected to arrive in early 2027. ASD-based solutions will require users to install up-to-date graphics drivers, but the technology is ultimately expected to support gaming-capable GPUs across multiple vendors, with applications on both PCs and mobile devices.