In a new devblog, the team at Microsoft have announced their Advanced Shader Delivery feature is now out of preview, and is arriving on October 16th alongside the ROG Xbox Ally handhelds. The goal? To “deliver a console-quality experience on Windows.“
If you’re a regular player of PC games, ‘Compiling Shaders’ is likely a term you’re familiar with. I’ll stay high level here (where I belong!), but here’s the long and short of it. When you see ‘Compiling Shaders’, it is your game converting and translating a developers shader code in a way that your GPU (graphics card) can execute.
As there are a multitude of different GPUs out there, shader compilation is a necessary evil so that games can run on all sorts of different PC hardware. It is, in modern gaming, also a primary cause of performance issues, slow loading times and visible stutter when playing games.
Consoles don’t really suffer from these issues, because consoles are fixed, known hardware. Developers know exactly what it in each machine, so the shaders can be precompiled.
In a new post on the Microsoft Dev Blog, the team have announced a new feature that’s now out of preview, and it’s aiming to make a big difference for PC gamers – and in turn, soon to be owners of Microsoft and ASUS’ new ROG Xbox Ally handheld.
What is ‘Advanced Shader Delivery’?
Per the blog post, “Advanced shader delivery is a new feature that distributes precompiled shaders when downloading a game, eliminating in-game shader compilation stutter and long load times. This solves one of the biggest pain points in PC gaming today, making it easier than ever to deliver a console-quality experience on Windows.“
The really good news is that this feature is arriving to coincide with the release of the ROG Xbox Ally handhelds. Per Microsoft, “Gamers who own these devices receive precompiled shaders at download time on select titles to start gaming faster.” The Developer Blog goes into a lot of detail that is far, far beyond my knowledge base, but the nutshell is – Microsoft are hoping this is going to make things better.
Per the Dev Blog – “The ROG Xbox Ally and Xbox Ally X will be the first devices to take advantage of these new capabilities, resulting in getting players into the game up to 10x faster, smoother, more consistent gameplay performance, and improved battery life. Our partners in Team Xbox have collected SODBs for a select set of popular titles, compiled them for these new handheld devices, and will deliver the precompiled shaders alongside the game package when a player downloads and installs a game from the Xbox on PC app. When players using these devices download games or install a new driver, Xbox will update the precompiled shaders to ensure you are always taking full advantage of the latest improvements.“
It will be interesting to see how quickly developers adopt these new features, and equally, how quickly gamers will begin to see tangible, real-world results. Super interesting!
More on the ROG Xbox Ally:
We’ve already gone hands-on with both devices at Gamescom, and I think the whole team were pretty impressed with both devices. Ultimately, while I absolutely would like to own one, it’s going to come down to price – and I imagine that’s the same for many of you.
The price has now been announced, and you can read more about that here and can pre-order one – if they’re not all sold out, which is looking increasingly likely.
Have you pre-ordered the ROG Xbox Ally or Ally X? Let us know over at the XboxEra Community Forum or in the Discord Server.
