Microsoft wants to soothe a big pain for PC gamers: Shaders

Microsoft said Wednesday that it’s working to remove one of the frustrating headaches for PC gamers: the need to compile shaders. Microsoft said that it will release an AgilitySDK in September to solve this problem, speeding up your time from downloading a game to playing it by as much as 85 percent.

If you play games on the Xbox or other consoles, you probably have no idea what we’re talking about. That’s because shaders — the instructions for rendering pixels as they move through the processing pipeline — are optimized for your specific hardware setup. An Xbox game “knows” what your console contains. Shaders for a PC game have to be optimized for each specific configuration, including the game, the GPU, and the GPU driver.

Doing so requires not just downloading the game but compiling the shaders for your hardware, which you might see occurring on the game’s loading screen. While those instructions are then stored on your PC, it’s still time that you have to wait before you can play the game. That’s one of the features Microsoft is adding to the launch of the ROG Xbox Ally and Ally X — since the configurations are fixed, the shaders can be downloaded as part of the game itself. Microsoft calls this “advanced shader delivery.”

Microsoft wants to take that convenience and extend it to a “number of devices,” Microsoft said Wednesday, presumably targeting the PC market as a whole.

Standardizing shaders saves time

What Microsoft is doing is to collect the shader data from a game in a standardized format, known as a State Object Database, or SODB. Microsoft said that it has worked with its key hardware partners to separate the shader compiler from the graphics driver and united the game data in the SODB with the compiler in the cloud to create a Precompiled Shader Database, or PSDB. This database will be downloaded along with the game, so the game will essentially be able to “look up” what shaders it needs in the database and launch them immediately.

“Now, when a game runs for the first time, it will see all the shaders it needs already available in a cache in Windows and can skip doing that compilation step on the gaming device,” Microsoft said. “If a device takes a driver update, we will detect that and update the shader cache automatically.”

Right now, this feature is exclusive to the Xbox gaming store, the Xbox PC app, and AMD processors — which power the two Asus ROG Ally devices. However, Microsoft said that the AgilitySDK will be provided to other storefronts as well as game developers, so they can do the necessary work on the back end. Microsoft said the feature will also be made available to games that have already shipped, but that work is in the future.

For now, Microsoft added that it is going to be working with specific devices to add this functionality, and it will share more details in September.

Microsoft calls this advanced shader delivery a solution to one of the more frustrating problems that a PC gamer has, and that’s true! Downloading gigabytes and gigabytes on a slow connection can be excruciating…with an additional delay for compiling the shaders itself. One of the best features of a console is how quickly you can power it on and jump into a game. It’s great that Microsoft sees the same future for the PC.