Nvidia driver update: Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 4 and Gears of War: E-Day exhibit reduced RAM usage thanks to Advanced Shader Delivery
Users are now loading and playing Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 4 after its recent launch across multiple platforms, including PC. To prepare, Nvidia released a new Game Ready Driver, version 621.01, on October 21. In addition to expected bug fixes and support for newer games like Modern Warfare 4, it also added a handy feature for Gears of War: E-Day and Modern Warfare 4 called Advanced Shader Delivery.
What is Advanced Shader Delivery?
Advanced Shader Delivery is a technology developed by Microsoft to eliminate the live shader compilation process that starts on the first boot of a freshly installed game. Advanced Shader Delivery is only supported by RTX GPUs.
With Advanced Shader Delivery, game developers can package the GPU instructions the game needs within the original game installation. The store reads these instructions and, based on the player’s hardware, loads pre-compiled shaders in the background during installation.
Advanced Shader Delivery not only lets players skip shader compilation wait times, but also reduces the performance overhead on the CPU and memory. As reported on X by journalist Sebastian Castellanos, the introduction of Advanced Shader Delivery to Nvidia GPUs, and the specific support for Gears of War E-Day, has greatly improved performance, with a staggering 7-8 GB reduction in RAM usage at boot, while other users report similar results.
The limitations of Advanced Shader Delivery are store-based
While Advanced Shader Delivery is a great technology, it does have limits. As mentioned earlier, Advanced Shader Delivery support depends on the store, since it provides precompiled shaders. In this case, the player should have downloaded Gears of War: E-Day or Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 4 from the Xbox PC App. Moreover, the feature is a recent addition to Nvidia RTX GPUs, so only a handful of games are currently supported.
Not all users seem enthused however; Some are blaming a recent Windows update as well as a game patch for reduced performance in Gears of War: E-day on Reddit with one user stating that performance had "gradually improved until it's back where it was prepatch."
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