Forza Horizon 6 boots up in just 4 seconds instead of 90 with new Advanced Shader Delivery tech and AMD GPUs — Microsoft claims 95% reduction in gaming load times

(Image credit: Microsoft)

Microsoft announced Advanced Shader Delivery (ASD) for Xbox ROG Ally devices last year, bringing precompiled shaders to the handheld to improve load times. Since then, ASD has been included in the DirectX SDK, with both Intel and Nvidia already releasing their own versions of the tech. Today, AMD joins them as Microsoft expands ASD beyond handhelds to RDNA 3, RDNA 3.5, and RDNA 4 GPUs.Forza Horizon 6 is the latest game to feature ASD on Windows 11 PCs, but you need the Microsoft Store/Xbox PC app version to take advantage of it. Using an RX 7600 GPU and a Ryzen 7 5800 CPU, Advanced Shader Delivery helped the game boot up 95% faster, taking only four seconds to load on first launch. Without ASD enabled, Forza Horizon 6 took nearly a minute and a half to load otherwise.

(Image credit: Microsoft)Microsoft's solution is to decouple shaders from drivers entirely and place them in a Precompiled Shader Database (PSDB) that lives in the cloud. Every time you download a game from the Microsoft Store or the Xbox PC app, ASD detects your specific configuration (game, GPU, driver) and downloads the precompiled shaders in advance. So, when you open the game, the shaders are already compiled, and you don't have to wait.Consoles have done this forever, which makes sense considering they don't have to worry about different hardware configs. Even Valve has a version of precompiled shaders for Linux that it developed for the Steam Deck, but never ported to Windows. Since SSDs have made long load times a thing of the past, this has been one of the last remaining hurdles to instantaneous game launches.