GDC 2026: Advanced Shader Delivery on Windows

At GDC 2026, during the Xbox Dev Summit session titled “Advanced Shader Delivery for Windows”, the DirectX team discussed the innovation they’re bringing in solving shader compilation for the ecosystem and what it means for developers. We’ve got some highlights from the session below, but be sure to visit the DirectX Developer Blog for more details.

The State of the Industry

Long shader compilation times and in-game shader stutter for D3D12 apps are two of the biggest problems in PC gaming. These problems are caused by compiling shaders at runtime. Unlike console, PC games do not have a fixed driver and GPU environment, and precompiled shaders need a way to be delivered to a large matrix of drivers and GPUs in the Windows ecosystem.

Last fall, the DirectX team announced how advanced shader delivery is solving the problem on the Xbox ROG Ally and Ally X devices. Today, Microsoft is uniting these ecosystem pieces between game developers, IHVs, and game stores to solve shader compilation on PC going forward.

As game developers, you can enable gamers to download fully compiled shaders for their specific hardware. In the previous DirectX blog post, you could learn how to trace your game title or programmatically generate a state object database (SODB) file and use an offline compiler to compile the state objects into a precompiled shader database (PSDB) format to test the advanced shader delivery benefits locally.

What’s New and Coming Soon

In the AgilitySDK 1.619 release, the DirectX team unveiled two new APIs: the app registration API and stats API.

App Identity  API: This API enables applications to declare their own application identity to D3D12 and the underlying graphics drivers in a standardized way. Allocations can set a default D3D12_APPLICATION_DESC and GUID to self-identify before a D3D12 device is created. Attaching application identity to the SODB will be a requirement for submitting an SODB file to the Xbox Partner Center for your title.

Stats API: This API gives game developers visibility into how well a precompiled shader database (PSDB) performs. If you are looking to see how well a given PSDB will work for a specific hardware configuration, these APIs will give game developers information on the shader cache hit rate.

PIX support: The May 2026 version of PIX will show these stats as real-time counters in PIX’s System Monitor view as your game runs.

Partial Graphics Programs:

Some titles have such a large amount of pipeline state objects (PSOs) to the point that most engines cannot enumerate them. Precompiling these PSO heavy titles in advance for many different hardware configurations for distribution through advanced shader delivery would take a significant amount of time and create duplicate effort. To address this, we are creating partial graphics programs. Partial graphics programs split the pipeline creation into two steps: create partial pre-rasterization and pixel shader programs containing common state used by different graphics pipelines, then link them together with other state.

For titles that have large amounts of PSOs, partial programs will be coming soon to more efficiently re-use graphics programs and link them together at runtime. In the meantime, check out our spec for partial graphics programs today.

Industry Alignment

The DirectX team is working closely with the GPU hardware vendors to expand advanced shader delivery across the PC ecosystem. Head over to the DirectX Developer Blog to learn more about what our partners have to say about support for this feature.

Call to action

In summary, to solve shader compilation for your title, there are two important steps: integrate SODB collection into your game engine and submit an SODB along with your game package to the Xbox Partner Center.

For more details on how to integrate SODB collection into the game development process, visit the DirectX Developer Blog.