THE CRUNCH
Nvidia has rolled out GPU driver 621.01, which enables Microsoft's Advanced Shader Delivery on GeForce cards. The technology speeds up game launches by offloading shader compilation to the cloud, and removes mid-game "just-in-time" compilation, which Nvidia says wipes out CPU spikes and frame stutters.
Shader compilation is the work a PC does translating game code into instructions your specific graphics card understands, traditionally done while you stare at a loading screen or, worse, mid-match. With Advanced Shader Delivery, developers using DirectX 12, Windows 11 and the Microsoft Agility SDK capture shaders into a State Object Database, letting Microsoft's cloud precompile them for hundreds of thousands of hardware and driver combinations. Nvidia's Andrew Burnes claims a near-100 percent cache hit rate for supported titles.
Gears of War: E-Day and Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 4 now both support the feature, though currently only when played via the Xbox PC app. Microsoft says support for other storefronts, including Steam and Epic Games, is coming "soon", with no release estimate. The 621.01 driver is available now, and the technology also works on AMD GPUs with Adrenalin 26.6.1 or higher and Qualcomm's Snapdragon X2 series with driver version 2026.08.3 or higher.
Hands-on testing bears out the promise: on a GeForce RTX 4080, Gears of War: E-Day's shader compilation, which could take upwards of 10 minutes, completed within seconds, with a "precompiled shaders installed" tooltip confirming the feature was active. The tester noted that claims of reduced mid-game stutter deserve deeper testing before being declared a win, and that it will take time for developers and Microsoft to build out the supported title library.