Last year at Gamescom 2025, a new Advanced Shader Delivery feature was unveiled by Microsoft's DirectX team that would arrive first on the ROG Xbox Ally and ROG Xbox Ally X handhelds that launched in October 2025. The new feature was co-developed by Xbox and AMD, and is meant to tackle shader stuttering. Now, as seemingly spotted by tech programmer at MADFINGER Games, Ondrej Hrušovský, the feature's implementation into Unreal Engine 5 is "in progress."
Hrušovský shared a screenshot of the code commitment to X (formerly Twitter), which you can see below.
Shader compilation stuttering has long been an issue for players that can impact even those with the best hardware on the market, not only because of the in-game issues, but the long load times that delay players from getting into their games sooner, which are specifically troublesome with Unreal Engine 5-built titles.
After the Advanced Shader Deliver feature was revealed last year, a month later, Microsoft released AgilitySDK 1.618, bringing the feature out of its preview state with the launch of the aforementioned ROG Xbox Ally handhelds and the Xbox PC app. Now, we're finally seeing the feature rolled out to Unreal Engine 5, and hopefully developers will really be able to take advantage of the feature in the war against shader stuttering.
During GDC 2026, Microsoft boasted about the gains the new feature was already bringing, with vice president of software developer Rodney Andre saying "Advanced Shader Delivery (ASD) is transforming the gaming experience, cutting load times and eliminating in-game stutter on Xbox ROG Ally devices. It's truly remarkable what the Microsoft and AMD engineering teams have accomplished in such a short period of time."
For Unreal's part, Mihnea Balta, director of rendering engineering at Epic Games said at the time, "As Unreal, we're excited about supporting advanced shader delivery in the ecosystem. We've been doing early testing and explorations on SODB and PSDB generation, and will have more details coming soon."
Well, it seems we've arrived at 'soon.' It would be a welcome change, for PC players, if we can all soon look at shader stuttering as a thing of the past with further implementation of this new feature.
About the author: David has been writing about videogames, technology, and culture since 2020, with a focus on reporting daily news across multiple publications, including GameDaily.Biz, GameSkinny, and PlayStation Universe before joining Wccftech in 2025. David started contributing as Canada/US reporter for Wccftech's gaming section in 2025. Besides being up-to-date on the industry's movements, he loves interviewing developers, reviewing games, and writing intricate essays about the symbolism and layered meanings to be found in rich narratives as he's done for publications like GamesIndustry.Biz, LostInCult, and others. Outside of games he loves movies, music, theatre, his hometown, and his family, though not necessarily in that order.
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