Unreal Engine 5.8 removes shader pre-compilation stutters with Advanced Shader Delivery

Unreal Engine 5.8 introduces Advanced Shader Delivery to eliminate stuttering by using pre- compiled shaders, supported on major PC GPUs.

Unreal Engine 5.8 is out and it addresses something that is arguably one of the biggest gripes among PC gamers these days… stutters from shader pre-compilation. With Unreal Engine 5.8, developers can avoid those long periods of shader pre-compilation that often results in hitches when you first start playing the game. This can lead to much better performance out of the gate for gamers… so long as the games are using the new standard. Because this pushes some of the shader work load from the player's PC onto the developer's build process.

Epic Games shifts shader compilation burden to developers via new tool

Epic Games has dropped Unreal Engine 5.8. This is a software update to their popular game engine. The big innovation here is something called Advanced Shader Delivery (ASD).

This is about how games handle shader compilation. The idea here with ASD is that games can bypass long periods of shader pre-compilation because you can use pre-compiled shaders instead of generating them on the fly. This is all meant to reduce stutters and improve frame pacing with UE engine titles.

ASDTool is a new tool that's part of the engine update to help with this. Developers will use ASDTool to create a Precompiled Shader Database (PSDB) from cooked windows builds. You'll upload the PSDB to compatible storefronts (ie.

Microsoft Store) so players can download it. That way you've got all the necessary shader info ready to go before the game even starts… instead of when you're in-game.

ASD works in conjunction with PSO precaching. Epic suggests that you keep your PSO precaching on to avoid hitches. The ASD system supports a variety of hardware.

Things like NVIDIA RTX GPUs, AMD RDNA 1+ graphics cards, Intel Battage, Qualcomm Snapdragon X Elite or Plus processors. The support is pretty broad so that the tech can be leveraged across a variety of PC / handheld setups.

We talked about some of the same balance/stability things in our last Unreal Engine 5.8 update coverage. This update is all about technical performance upgrades. No content updates here.

The ASD integration is a structural change to how UE5 games do their graphics work. So developers that make use of this tool will be able to offer a much more stable experience. And players won't have to wait around for stuff to compile.

Source: TweakTown