Unreal Engine 5.8 Adds Advanced Shader Delivery to Cut PC Stutter

A major issue with Unreal Engine 5 on PC is the stuttering that can come from real-time shader compilation. Epic Games is taking steps to improve Unreal Engine 5's performance by bringing in Microsoft's Advanced Shader Delivery (ASD) in Unreal Engine 5.8. This is intended to ease some of that strain on the player's system, enabling faster launch times and a better experience for supported titles.

New tool precompiles shaders to reduce runtime stutter on PC

As part of this update to the engine, developers will get a new ASD Tool. This tool will let them create a State Object Database (SODB) from a cooked Windows Direct3D12 game build. As Epic Games describes in its documentation, this is handling the assets converted and optimized for the platform before you even see it.

Advanced Shader Delivery enables precompilation of shaders against a given GPU and driver architecture before the game is downloaded. This is meant to greatly reduce the risk of shader stuttering while playing the game. For now, this isn't supported for ray tracing PSOs, limiting its effectiveness to regular rendering approaches.

Microsoft Store and Xbox PC App already support Advanced Shader Delivery. Epic and Steam are aiming to bring support in early 2027. We've seen some familiar themes of stability in our last coverage of the Unreal Engine 5.8 update. But this tech solution is addressing a big pain point for PC gaming.

Unreal Engine 5.8 will include the tools you need for these optimizations. That means creating the relevant databases for better gameplay on supported storefronts. It's all Direct3D12 for now, but ray tracing will hopefully be part of it moving forward.