Forza Horizon 6 loads in 4 seconds with Microsoft's Advanced Shader Delivery tech

Microsoft announced Advanced Shader Delivery (ASD) this week, a DirectX 12 feature that slashes shader compilation stutter. Forza Horizon 6 is the first game to ship with it. On AMD GPUs, the game now loads in 4 seconds instead of 90, per Tom's Hardware.

ASD works by precompiling shaders on Microsoft's servers and delivering them to your machine before launch. The old way: your GPU compiles thousands of shaders locally on first boot, which causes the multi-minute waits and stuttering many Unreal Engine 5 games still inflict. This bypasses that step entirely. Microsoft claims a 95% reduction in load times for supported games.

The catch: it's AMD-only at launch. Nvidia and Intel support is "coming later this year," according to the blog post. AMD worked directly with Microsoft on the rollout, so their RDNA 3 and RDNA 2 cards get priority. If you're on a 7900 XTX or 6800 XT, you'll see the benefit immediately when Horizon 6 drops in June.

This is the first real fix for shader compilation stutter that doesn't rely on individual studios implementing PSO caches correctly. If Microsoft pushes ASD into the DirectX 12 Agility SDK, more games could adopt it without extra dev work. That would be a big win for anyone tired of 2-minute boot screens and microstutters in the first match.

When Forza Horizon 6 releases, run a fresh optimize playbook to confirm your rig hits 144 FPS with ASD enabled.