Say goodbye to twiddling your thumbs while you wait for your game to compile its shaders, as Intel is promising up to three times faster first-time game loads. The company has started rolling out its precompiled shader system for Arc B-Series and Intel Core Ultra Series 2/3 CPUs as part of its Arc 32.0.101.8626 WHQL graphics drivers. The shader distribution service downloads the necessary files from Intel’s cloud server, instead of relying on the heavy and time-consuming local shader compilation processes.
Based on Microsoft’s DirectX Advanced Shader Delivery feature, Intel Precompiled Shader Distribution aims to remove/reduce the shader compilation process games conduct during their initial launch after installation. Shader compilation consists of converting shader code (lighting, shadows, materials, and so on) into machine code that the GPU can execute efficiently. To accelerate the process, Intel precompiles this code for each supported game and GPU, and hosts the ready files in its cloud. These then can be accessed by your Intel GPU drivers, which detect and automatically download the ones needed for your games.
The Last of Us Part I was famous for this problem, taking more than two hours to finish, which meant that by the time you got access to the game, the Steam guaranteed refund was no longer applicable. If it only happened once, you could take a walk and treat the process as part of the game download/installation phase, but the issue is that shader compilation can get triggered by many factors, including game or driver updates. To put it simply, these precompiled shaders will save players a lot of time. If this could also fix games that run a quick shader compilation step during each launch, such as Call of Duty: Warzone, that would be nice too.
Note that while Intel is the first to implement this feature on desktops and laptops, handhelds got their equivalent earlier through Shader Pre-Caching on Valve’s Steam Deck and Advanced Shader Delivery on Asus ROG Xbox Ally.
The first batch of supported games include:
- Black Myth: Wukong
- Borderlands 4
- Call of Duty: Black Ops 6
- Call of Duty: Black Ops 7
- Cyberpunk 2077
- God of War Ragnarök
- Gotham Knights
- Hogwarts Legacy
- NBA 2K26
- Starfield
- S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2: Heart of Chornobyl
- The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion Remastered
- The Outer Worlds 2
As for performance, Intel claims that precompiled shaders improve loading times by over 2x on average using an Arc B580 GPU plus B390 iGPU (Core Ultra X9 388H), with more than a 3x boost on Arc 140V iGPU (Core Ultra 9 288V) machines. Depending on the game, you may see even more impressive changes, as with God of War Ragnarok, which witnessed a 37x uplift using an Arc B390. Now the question is, will Intel be able to follow the pace and release updated shaders? We surely hope so.
