Unreal Engine 5 may be getting Microsoft's DirectX 12 Advanced Shader Delivery

Last month, Microsoft announced it is bringing Advanced Shader Delivery (ASD) for Windows to PC gamers via the latest AgilitySDK 1.619 release. The feature was originally unveiled by Microsoft's DirectX team at Gamescom 2025 to address shader stuttering, with ROG Xbox Ally handhelds set to receive it first. Now, ASD is seemingly rolling out to Unreal Engine 5, enabling developers to use it for reducing shader stuttering and long load times.

A recent UE5-main commit shared on X by MADFINGER Games tech programmer Ondrej Hrušovský, and highlighted by VideoCardz, shows Epic working on 'ASD Tool improvements,' such as graphics PSO serialization, new D3D12 helper code, and PSO compilation fixes. While Hrušovský describes the implementation as 'in progress,' Epic has yet to comment officially.

This isn't the first time we have seen UE5 and ASD mentioned together. Back in March, Mihnea Balta, director of rendering engineering at Epic Games, said that "as Unreal, we're excited about supporting advanced shader delivery in the ecosystem," adding that early SODB and PSDB testing for Advanced Shader Delivery was already underway with more details to follow.

It was high time for Epic to join the party. Intel already added a driver-side version through its Precompiled Shaders feature, which cuts game load times by up to 3x by downloading GPU and driver-specific shader files and storing them locally. NVIDIA has also confirmed that full support for Microsoft's Advanced Shader Delivery is coming for GeForce RTX users later in 2026. Its current Auto Shader Compilation only rebuilds DirectX shaders after driver updates, with first-run in-game shader generation still happening as normal.

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Epic explained last year that DirectX 12 stutter often stems from Pipeline State Object compilation during gameplay, and that UE 5.5 still had a gap in global graphics shaders. With ASD, developers can collect a State Object Database, compile it offline into a Precompiled Shader Database, and ship that data so games can skip part of the normal runtime compilation path that causes long first launches and shader stutter.

Microsoft has also been building partial graphics programs for PSO-heavy titles, splitting pre-rasterization and pixel shader work into reusable parts that can be linked later. Shader compilation stuttering has been a vocal pain point for PC gamers for years, even on high-end hardware, so it's a welcome sign to finally see the industry fighting it.