Earlier today, Microsoft announced that the ROG Xbox Ally and Ally X are launching on October 16. One of the software features revealed alongside these handheld PCs is Advanced Shader Delivery. Now, Microsoft has shared more details about this particular technology.
The Redmond tech firm explained that games sometimes take long to load on first launch and stutter because graphic shaders are first compiled and then cached for future use. This has a burden on Windows PC resources, which slows down the game. To tackle this problem, Xbox and AMD have collaborated to develop Advanced Shader Delivery, which basically precompiles shaders and then delivers them at download time. This means that there is less of a resource strain during a game"s first launch, which results in reduced chances of stuttering and other performance issues.
In terms of technical implementation, the DirectX team has figured out a way to collect shader data - used by a game to interact with the GPU for in-game aspects like lighting, textures, physics, and more -, and package it as a State Object Database (SODB). This object is then combined with game data on a compiler in the cloud and stored as a Precompiled Shader Database (PSDB). This database is then distributed through the Xbox Store, which means that shader data is already stored in the cache and does not need to be compiled while the game is running. Of course, this is only a simplified version, and you can find more details in the dedicated blog post here.
Right now, Advanced Shader Delivery is geared more towards the upcoming PC handhelds, but Microsoft plans to release an AgilitySDK in September so other developers, hardware partners, and storefronts can leverage this technology too. Developers don"t need to make any changes in individual titles to accommodate the tech, as Microsoft plans to implement it directly in game engines. Performance improvements can be significant; Microsoft noted that launch times reduced by 85% in Avowed.