Intel joins Microsoft in a push to load PC games faster — up to 37X

Intel is joining Microsoft in releasing precompiled shaders for its own graphics cards, which will save you time in loading and then playing PC games.

Intel said earlier this week that it will store precompiled shaders in the cloud, and then download them when needed to your PC. Intel debuted the technology inside its Intel graphics driver 32.0.101.8626, which includes the first iteration of what Intel calls the Intel Graphics Shader Distribution Service.

Typically, playing a game on a PC means applying shaders, the instructions that specifically tell the game how to be played on your PC. Those shaders must be specifically coded to your PC’s specific hardware, then downloaded or loaded. It’s more of an inconvenience than anything else, and usually hides within and prolongs the load times when playing a game — but the shaders may need to be reapplied when your PC receives a new graphics driver, too. Gaming consoles don’t typically have this problem, as the hardware is standardized.

What Intel’s shader distribution service does is to precompile all the possible shaders in the cloud, then let your PC talk to the cloud service. When needed, all the precompiled shaders will then download to your PC. The process skips the step where your PC actually searches for, downloads, and then compiles the shaders when you install a new game.

Instead, those shaders are cached on your PC, ready to go, which should minimize loading times: 1.3 to 5 times faster than before — even, in an extreme example, up to 37 times faster with God of War: Ragnarok, Intel says. (That uses the Intel Core Ultra 9 288V with the Intel Arc 140V, a configuration not shown below.)

There’s another benefit, too: Sometimes your actual gameplay will hitch and stutter due to shader glitches. Intel says this new program will solve that.

Intel, though, has an advantage: With a relatively small share of the discrete graphics market, the precompiled shaders don’t need to be compiled for too many configurations. The driver covers the Intel Arc B-Series discrete graphics, the Intel Arc A-Series graphics, and the Intel Core Ultra processors with integrated Arc graphics inside.

But Intel has an ally, Microsoft, which said last year that it, too, wants to precompile shaders. Microsoft, of course, has a far more challenging problem, as it must compensate for the wide variety of hardware that’s available to gamers. What Microsoft is doing is to collect the shader data from a game in a standardized format, known as a State Object Database, or SODB, and is trying to create a cloud database known as the Precompiled Shader Database, or PSDB.

To enable this new feature, Intel says you’ll need to do the following:

The only catch, if there is one, is that this new feature won’t run on all games, just supported Steam games that you’ve already installed on your PC. Those games include:

Naturally, Intel expects that list to expand further into the future, where the precompiled shaders will be downloaded for those games, as well. While it doesn’t appear that too many older games will receive the precompiled shader treatment, it does appear that newer games that you purchase now and into the future will load more quickly and easily.