Nvidia Driver 621.01 Brings Microsoft's Advanced Shader Delivery to PC Games
Nvidia's new 621.01 GPU driver adds support for Microsoft's Advanced Shader Delivery, which precompiles shaders in the cloud to cut load times, stuttering and CPU spikes in supported games.
Advanced Shader Delivery moves shader compilation for different hardware combinations to the cloud. Nvidia's Andrew Burnes said developers use DirectX 12, Windows 11 and the Microsoft Agility SDK to capture shaders into a State Object Database, which allows Microsoft's cloud network to precompile shaders for hundreds of thousands of hardware and driver combinations. The approach also removes mid-game "just-in-time" shader compilation, which Nvidia says reduces stuttering and CPU spikes.
Gears of War: E-Day and Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 4 now support the technology, provided the games are downloaded through the Xbox PC app. Burnes said the system is storefront-agnostic, so players benefit even when playing games purchased on Steam, as long as the Xbox PC app is installed. With a near-100 percent cache hit rate, he said, the technology eliminates in-game shader compilation and the associated CPU spikes and frame stutters in the two titles. It also lets players skip the shader compilation screen in Call of Duty.
Advanced Shader Delivery is not limited to Nvidia hardware. It is also supported on AMD GPUs with Adrenalin 26.6.1 or higher and on Qualcomm's Snapdragon X2 series with driver version 2026.08.3 or higher.