No more waiting on shaders to compile as Nvidia's latest driver adds advanced shader delivery: users report lower RAM usage in Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 4 and Gears of War: E-Day

Instead of waiting around at your rig, the cloud can do all of the heavy lifting instead.

In the era of speedy solid state drives, I barely remember the last time I saw a loading screen. I say 'barely' because it was, in fact, last night as I waited for Star Wars Zero Company to compile its shaders for a second time following a crash I encountered during the tutorial mission. Some of us are just blessed (read: cursed) like that. Thankfully, more and more games are moving towards pre-compiling shaders.

Case in point, Nvidia just released a fresh GeForce Game Ready Driver that adds support for Advanced Shader Delivery in both Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 4 and Gears of War: E-Day . I've not had a chance to test the Nvidia GeForce 621.01 WHQL driver yet, but journalist Sebastian Castellanos notes "considerably lower system RAM usage" with it installed.

He wrote on X , "In Gears of War: E-Day, [RAM usage is] about 7-8 GB lower in my case. CPU usage is still relatively high though."

To briefly recap, Advanced Shader Delivery is Microsoft tech that compiles a game's shaders before you ever hit 'play', distributing them during the download process and banishing that pesky in-game load screen. This update brings support to all RTX GPUs, from the 20-series to the 50-series, but the tech is only available for certain games.

Back in May, Microsoft worked with AMD to get Advanced Shader Delivery support in a number of games—but only if you download them via the Xbox app. It's the same story here, with Nvidia writing , "When you download or update a supported title, the exact Precompiled Shader Database (PSDB) tailored to your rig is bundled with your download via the Xbox PC app, meaning ASD-supported games purchased from the Microsoft Store will offer a seamless experience."