Microsoft says shipping precompiled shaders with a game download cuts first-launch shader compilation time by approximately 95%, and Gears of War: E-Day is the first game to get it.
The DirectX Developer Blog says the wait drops to a few seconds, against several minutes on a typical PC without the feature. The post went up on October 1.
What Advanced Shader Delivery does to Gears of War: E-Day on PC
Advanced Shader Delivery is Microsoft’s name for the technique, and the idea is blunt. The shader work a CPU normally grinds through at startup is done ahead of time and downloaded with the game.
Microsoft says that reduces the amount of shader work a player’s CPU has to do when the game starts, which it credits for both faster launches and less stutter tied to runtime compilation.
The 95% figure is Microsoft’s own. No test hardware is named, no methodology is published, and the only before-and-after given is the few seconds against several minutes line.
Nothing in the post claims a frame rate improvement. The claims are about how long you stare at a loading screen the first time and how often the game hitches afterwards.
Microsoft says it worked with The Coalition on the implementation, and it expanded the feature’s public preview across the AMD RDNA line in May.
AMD and Snapdragon X2 are supported now, Intel and RTX later
Supported at the time of the post: AMD RDNA 1, RDNA 2, RDNA 3, RDNA 3.5 and RDNA 4 on Adrenalin 26.6.1 or higher, plus Qualcomm Snapdragon X2 Series on driver 2026.08.3 or higher.
Everything else is queued. Microsoft lists Intel Arc B570 and B580, Core Ultra Series 2 and Core Ultra Series 3, and all RTX GPUs plus RTX Spark as arriving later this month.
So an RTX owner installing Gears of War: E-Day right now still sits through the usual compile. No date inside October is given for either vendor.
The blog is explicit that the game is the first to support the feature across AMD, Intel, NVIDIA and Qualcomm hardware. Having the game ready is not the same as having the drivers ready.
Windows 11 24H2 and the Xbox PC app are both required
The system requirements start at Windows 11 24H2 or higher. Microsoft also tells players to install the Xbox PC app before downloading the game, a step that is easy to miss when the game is bought on Steam.
That floor is higher than the game itself needs. The Steam store page lists Windows 10 64-bit as the minimum, so a Windows 10 machine can run E-Day and still get none of this.
When it is working, the line Precompiled shaders installed appears in the launch window. That is the only confirmation the post offers.
Gears of War: E-Day is $69.99 in the US on its Steam page, which lists The Coalition as developer and Xbox Game Studios as publisher. ICXM covered its October 6 launch after a week of early access.
Developers who want it have to collect state object databases and upload them to game storefronts, according to Microsoft, with the compiler plugins either bundled with supported drivers or pulled from the vendors.
Microsoft names Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 4 as the next game in line for the feature and attaches no date to it.
