Following a period of Xbox Insider testing, Microsoft is now rolling out Advanced Shader Delivery to all Xbox App users on Windows 11. The feature allows users to download precompiled shaders alongside popular games to reduce initial load times and reduce stutter. 

According to an update posted to Microsoft's DirectX Developer blog, the tool is now widely available through the Xbox PC app. AMD has also announced that it is now expanding support for Advanced Shader Delivery, covering all RDNA GPUs, going all the way back to RDNA 1.

Microsoft highlighted Forza Horizon 6 as its primary example of the feature running, allowing the game to load in just four seconds, compared to a 1.5-minute wait time without precompiled shaders.

The full list of games that support Advanced Shader Delivery is shown below:

• 007 First Light
• Ark Survival Ascended
• Avowed
• Call of Duty: Black Ops 6
• Call of Duty: Black Ops 7
• Clair Obscur: Expedition 33
• Control Standard Edition
• Crimson Desert
• Dead Island 2
• Deep Rock Galactic
• Farming Simulator 25
• Final Fantasy VII Remake Intergrade
• Final Fantasy XVI
• Forspoken
• Forza Horizon 5
• Forza Horizon 6
• Forza Motorsport
• Gears of War: Reloaded
• Gears Tactics
• Grand Theft Auto V Enhanced
• Grounded 2
• Hades 2
• High On Life 2
• Hogwarts Legacy
• Keeper
• Lies of P
• Metro Exodus
• Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024
• Monster Hunter Rise
• NBA 2k26
• Ninja Gaiden 4
• Persona 3 Reload
• Resident Evil 2 (2019)
• Resident Evil 3
• S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2: Heart of Chornobyl
• Sea of Thieves
• Silent Hill f
• Sniper Elite: Resistance
• South of Midnight
• Starfield
• Subnautica 2
• The Callisto Protocol
• The Elder Scrolls: Oblivion Remaster
• The Outer Worlds 2
• Where Winds Meet

KitGuru says: For now, this will be most useful to Game Pass users, or those that take advantage of titles that support Xbox Play Anywhere. 

The post Advanced Shader Delivery support expanded to all RDNA GPUs first appeared on KitGuru.

AOC has introduced the U27V6RL/WW, a 27-inch Fast IPS monitor aimed at the Chinese market. Aimed at office work and gaming, the display stands out for its dual-mode capability and the inclusion of BOE's hardware-level Circular Polarization technology to enhance eye protection.

The U27V6RL/WW (via DisplaySpecifications) features a flexible native resolution configuration, enabling users to choose between 4K at 80 Hz and dropping the screen to full HD (1920×1080) at 311 Hz for smooth frame pacing. The display panel boasts a typical brightness of 400 nits and carries a VESA DisplayHDR 400 certification. Regarding colour coverage, it covers 100% of the sRGB spectrum and 96% of the DCI-P3 wide colour gamut, with a factory-calibrated average Delta E of less than 2 in standard sRGB mode.

By embedding BOE's Circular Polarization hardware directly into the display layer, the screen minimises reflections. It maintains clean readability when users operate it in bright ambient environments or view the panel through polarised sunglasses. Visual safety is further reinforced with hardware-based low-blue-light protection that shifts light wavelengths without distorting colour accuracy, granting the display official TÜV Rheinland Low Blue Light and Flicker-Free certifications.

Gamers are supported by response speeds reaching 0.5ms MPRT and 2ms grey-to-grey, alongside Adaptive-Sync and AMD FreeSync compatibility to eliminate screen tearing. Connectivity is versatile, including an HDMI 2.1 port, a DisplayPort 1.4 interface, a USB-C port supporting DisplayPort Alternate mode, and a dual USB 3.2 Gen 1 hub with a high-speed peripheral charging port. The included stand offers 150mm of height adjustment, along with full pivot, swivel, and tilt angles.

Discuss on our Facebook page, HERE.

KitGuru says: If you play games and work in the same setup, monitors such as the U27V6RL/WW are a good option, especially if you don't like the typical ‘gamer' aesthetic.

The post AOC launches 4K dual-mode monitor with BOE’s Circular Polarization first appeared on KitGuru.

For decades, there has been a discrepency between the level of optimisation game developers are able to achieve on a console versus the PC hardware equivalent. As Microsoft continues its PC gaming push, it is hoping to close that gap with major updates to DirectX.

DirectX is Microsoft’s long‑running suite of APIs that handle core multimedia tasks on Windows, including graphics, audio, input, and advanced GPU features. It’s the foundation for most PC game development, providing a consistent feature set across GPUs from Nvidia, AMD, and Intel. Because Windows remains the dominant platform for PC gaming, DirectX is used in the vast majority of modern titles, from large AAA engines to smaller indie projects, and it underpins major technologies like ray tracing, variable rate shading, and upscaling frameworks.

With DirectX 12 almost a decade ago, Microsoft made some big strides, providing developers with lower level access to PC hardware to improve performance. However, we have still not quite reached an equilibrium between resource access on PC versus a specialised console like the Xbox or PS5. That gap should shrink even further with the next major update to DirextX though.

At GDC this week, Microsoft announced that it has partnered up with AMD, Intel, Nvidia and Qualcomm for its next major DirectX update, which it says will be “the biggest wave of new tooling features” in the API's history. The new features almost exclusively focus on improving game optimisation and debugging.

The headline addition is DirectX Dump Files, a unified crash‑dump format that captures hardware state, driver and OS context, D3D objects, and up to 2MB of developer‑selected data. These dumps work across retail and development environments, with three overhead tiers and zero‑overhead capture enabled by default on Tier 2 hardware. Combined with full PIX support and new D3D12 controls for DebugBreak() in Shader Model 6.10, developers can now generate highly actionable GPU crash diagnostics that point to root causes rather than downstream failures.

PIX itself is receiving a major overhaul. Shader Explorer introduces low‑level, cross‑vendor shader analysis built on the compiler infrastructure from Advanced Shader Delivery, enabling iterative optimisation across any GPU. A long‑term effort to bring live, on‑chip shader debugging from Xbox to Windows is underway, with early components already surfacing. Additional improvements include a new GPU capture file format, hardware counter integration in System Monitor, a dedicated Tile Mappings viewer, and broad API access to PIX features via C++, C#, and Python. Hardware partners are contributing plugins to expose device‑specific insights throughout the PIX UI, ensuring consistent tooling across architectures.

Microsoft will begin rolling out its new DirectX features starting in May 2026, except for the new Shader Explorer, which arrives later in the year. The news comes at an interesting time as Microsoft also just announced Project Helix, the codename for its next-generation Xbox console, which for the very first time will also double as a PC, capable of running Windows games.

Discuss on our Facebook page, HERE.

KitGuru Says: With the PC hardware market hitting another wave of shortages, many are going to find themselves unable to upgrade over the next couple of years. With that in mind, there will need to be a renewed effort amongst game developers to optimise titles as much as possible. Microsoft seems to be getting the ball rolling here with a fresh new wave of DirectX features to improve debugging and optimisation.

The post Microsoft aims to close the PC-console optimisation gap with new DirectX features first appeared on KitGuru.

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Microsoft's latest attempt to optimize rendering workloads has delivered impressive performance gains, with Intel's Battlemage GPUs seeing a significant boost. Microsoft Manages to Optimize Complex Rendering With SER, Leading to Improved Rendering Performance As rendering pipelines become increasingly complex each day, the traditional approach to such workloads has begun to create a performance bottleneck, and Microsoft's SER addresses an important one. For those unaware, SER stands for Shader Execution Reordering, and it is a feature in Shader Model 6.9, meaning we will see SER become a standard with the upcoming driver code. I won't make SER too complex to understand, […]

Read full article at https://wccftech.com/microsoft-directx-ser-delivers-a-90-percent-performance-boost-on-intel-gpu/