Microsoft said Wednesday that it’s working to remove one of the frustrating headaches for PC gamers: the need to compile shaders. Microsoft said that it will release an AgilitySDK in September to solve this problem, speeding up your time from downloading a game to playing it by as much as 85 percent.
If you play games on the Xbox or other consoles, you probably have no idea what we’re talking about. That’s because shaders — the instructions for rendering pixels as they move through the processing pipeline — are optimized for your specific hardware setup. An Xbox game “knows” what your console contains. Shaders for a PC game have to be optimized for each specific configuration, including the game, the GPU, and the GPU driver.
Doing so requires not just downloading the game but compiling t