Unreal Engine may be getting Microsoft’s precompiled shader delivery pipeline

A recent ue5-main commit shared on X shows Epic working on “ ASD Tool improvements ”, including graphics PSO serialization, new D3D12 helper code, and fixes for graphics PSO compilation. Epic has not published a separate announcement for this change, but Microsoft said in March that Unreal was already doing early SODB and PSDB testing for Advanced Shader Delivery.

Advanced Shader Delivery, or ASD, is Microsoft’s DirectX 12 path for reducing shader compilation delays on Windows. The idea is to let developers collect a State Object Database, compile it offline into a Precompiled Shader Database, and ship that data so games can avoid part of the normal runtime compilation path that causes long first launches and shader stutter.

Source: Ondrej Hrusovsky

Epic explained last year that DirectX 12 stutter often comes from Pipeline State Object compilation during gameplay, and that UE 5.5 still had a remaining gap around global graphics shaders. This is UE5’s Achilles heel. Microsoft has also been building “partial graphics programs” for PSO-heavy titles, splitting pre-rasterization and pixel shader work into reusable parts that can be linked later.

Intel and NVIDIA already have their shader delivery

Intel already offers a driver-side version of this through its Precompiled Shaders feature. It downloads GPU- and driver-specific shader files, stores them locally, and currently supports Lunar Lake, Panther Lake, and Arc B-series GPUs on driver 32.0.101.8626 or newer, with support limited to select Steam games.

NVIDIA is not there yet. Its current Auto Shader Compilation feature rebuilds DirectX 12 shaders after driver updates, but first-run in-game shader generation still happens. Full Advanced Shader Delivery support for GeForce RTX is still planned for later this year.

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