Intel's new feature can improve game loading times by up to 3x — Precompiled Shader Delivery comes to Arc Xe2 and Xe3 GPUs following DirectX SDK release

Microsoft launched Advanced Shader Delivery (ASD) last year as part of the DirectX SDK, but it was limited to only the ROG Xbox Ally devices at the time. The feature was always intended to eventually go mainstream — and Intel has just released a new graphics driver that brings a version of it to Arc GPUs. The company is calling it "Precompiled Shader Distribution" and it's available on select mobile and desktop chips.

Precompiled Shader Distribution downloads the shaders for a game ahead of time, so you don't have to wait for the shader cache to build up when you first open it. The process happens automatically in the background once the Intel Graphics app detects you have the game installed. Depending on your exact hardware config, it starts downloading shaders from Intel's cloud and loads them into a dedicated folder.

Intel told TechPowerUp it is "also working with Microsoft on launching Advanced Shader Delivery later this year," meaning that this is Intel's own implementation for now — it will only get better from here (hopefully). The feature is launching with 13 Steam games: They're all heavy-hitters and will offer some level of faster loading, while reducing shader stuttering mid-gameplay.

• Black Myth: Wukong
• Borderlands 4
• Call of Duty: Black Ops 6
• Call of Duty: Black Ops 7
• Cyberpunk 2077
• God of War Ragnarök
• Gotham Knights
• Hogwarts Legacy
• NBA 2K26
• Starfield
• S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2: Heart of Chornobyl
• The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion Remastered
• The Outer Worlds 2

The company is claiming this will make your games load 2x faster on Arc B-series discrete GPUs and on the Core Ultra 200 series' integrated graphics, on average. The latest Panther Lake lineup with Xe3 graphics will benefit even more and will receive an average 3x improvement in game loading times. There's no support for Arc Alchemist yet — and it may not be coming soon, since Intel lists the latest Arc GPUs as a hardware requirement.

In the benchmarks shared, God of War: Ragnarok was the most impressive by far, loading an insane 37 times faster with Precompiled Shader Distribution on an Arc B390 iGPU. The Oblivion Remaster only saw a 1.3x improvement across both the Arc B580 graphics card and the Arc 140V iGPU on a Core Ultra 9 288V. Of course, not every game will take full advantage of this feature — especially not right away.

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But as Advanced Shader Delivery becomes commonplace and other chipmakers like Nvidia and AMD started introducing it on the driver level, shader caching issues should slowly become a thing of the past. PC will be able to achieve parity with console in yet another field, since its plus point — the variety of hardware configs — has actually held back precompiled shaders from being a possibility on the platform for a long time.

Precompiled Shader Delivery will also update cache for all the shaders alongside new drivers, so your game is always running smoothly. Within the driver release, Intel actually calls this feature "Graphics Shader Distribution Service" — but it refers to the same thing. If you want to enable it on your own Arc GPU, open the Intel Graphics Software, go to Graphics, then 3D Rendering, and you'll see the toggle right there.

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