Forza Horizon 6 boots up in just 4 seconds instead of 90 with new Advanced Shader Delivery tech and AMD GPUs — Microsoft claims 95% reduction in gaming load times

Precompiled shaders inside Forza Horizon 6.

Microsoft announced Advanced Shader Delivery (ASD) for Xbox ROG Ally devices last year, bringing precompiled shaders to the handheld to improve load times. Since then, ASD has been included in the DirectX SDK, with both Intel and Nvidia already releasing their own versions of the tech. Today, AMD joins them as Microsoft expands ASD beyond handhelds to RDNA 3, RDNA 3.5, and RDNA 4 GPUs.

Forza Horizon 6 is the latest game to feature ASD on Windows 11 PCs, but you need the Microsoft Store/Xbox PC app version to take advantage of it. Using an RX 7600 GPU and a Ryzen 7 5800 CPU, Advanced Shader Delivery helped the game boot up 95% faster, taking only four seconds to load on first launch. Without ASD enabled, Forza Horizon 6 took nearly a minute and a half to load otherwise.