Advanced Shader Delivery Reaches Every RTX GPU with GeForce 621.01, and Snapdragon X2 Joins the Party

The “compiling shaders” screen has a target on its back, and as of this week every major PC graphics vendor is in on it.

NVIDIA’s GeForce Game Ready 621.01 WHQL driver adds support for Microsoft’s Advanced Shader Delivery (ASD) on GeForce RTX hardware. It launches with Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 4 and Gears of War: E-Day.

NVIDIA says local shader compilation can force waits of up to 30 minutes when a game launches or updates. ASD offloads that work to the cloud. Developers capture shaders into a State Object Database. Microsoft then precompiles them for hundreds of thousands of hardware and driver combinations. The matching Precompiled Shader Database ships with your download through the Xbox PC app. NVIDIA claims a near-100% cache hit rate, which should also eliminate mid-game just-in-time compilation stutter.

Qualcomm moved at the same time. Its developer blog confirms ASD is now available on Snapdragon X2 Series through its DirectX 12 compiler plugin. Microsoft’s DirectX team lists the requirements: Windows 11 24H2 or later, Adreno driver 2026.08.3 or newer, and Adrenalin 26.6.1 or newer for AMD’s RDNA 1 through RDNA 4 cards. The same post slates all RTX GPUs, RTX Spark, Intel Arc B570 and B580, and Core Ultra Series 2 and 3 for October.

The 621.01 driver also carries Game Ready support for Phantom Blade Zero, NBA 2K27, Cyberpunk 2077’s 2.5 update, and Crimson Desert’s Charting the Unknown. The full fix list is linked from NVIDIA’s driver article.

We have followed ASD since it launched on AMD hardware. Our Forza Horizon 6 coverage showed load times dropping to as low as 2 seconds. Reviewers also flagged Gears of War: E-Day as a rare UE5 game that wants more CPU cores, which is exactly where offloading compilation helps most.

Here is the catch: ASD works through the Xbox PC app and Microsoft Store purchases. If you own Modern Warfare 4 on Steam or Battle.net, this driver changes nothing about your shader wait. Microsoft built a good solution to one of PC gaming’s worst habits, then tied it to its own storefront. (Ed: Valve’s Steam shader pre-caching on Linux and Steam Deck would like a word.)

The tech is right; the distribution is the question. Until Steam and the other launchers get a path to precompiled shader databases, ASD is a perk for Xbox app users rather than a fix for PC gaming at large. Install 621.01 regardless; the bug fixes are worth having.

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