Hate waiting for games to load? Intel's new trick for Arc GPUs will be music to your ears, especially if you have a handheld | Tech Radar

Overview

Hate waiting for games to load? Intel's new trick for Arc GPUs will be music to your ears, especially if you have a handheld

Precompiled Shaders is a real timesaver — situationally — for Battlemage desktop GPUs, and integrated Xe 2 or Xe 3 graphics

Details

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It introduces a Precompiled Shaders feature to help supported games load faster

This is a situational benefit, but it'll apply more often than you think

Intel has introduced a new trick for some of its Arc GPUs, which helps supported games load a lot more swiftly (albeit in certain situations only, and I'll come back to that point).

Wccftech reports (via Tech Power Up) that Intel's Precompiled Shaders feature is available with the latest Arc driver, and can be used by Intel Battlemage desktop GPUs, as well as Xe 2 and Xe 3 integrated graphics (in Core Ultra Series 3 and 200V chips for thin-and-light laptops, or handhelds).

How it works is this: normally, when you load a game for the first time, compiling shaders can take a long time and really slow things down. So what Intel does is precompile these shaders, and it has these stored in the cloud — then when its graphics app examines your installed games, and sees one it has shaders for, they're automatically downloaded and put in place.

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Effectively, all that compiling work is being done beforehand, so when you launch the game, it loads far more snappily. We're talking about loading times that are typically twice or three times as fast, but some games can receive massive boosts — like God of War Ragnarok, which is 21x faster on an Arc B580 (or a mind-boggling 37x faster with the B390 integrated graphics on the new Panther Lake flagship).

As mentioned earlier, the game must be supported by Intel to allow for Precompiled Shaders, and only 13 titles are right now, but more are coming in the future. Further note that the games must be installed on Steam, and the current list of supported titles is:

Note that this is Intel's implementation of a broader tech coming from Microsoft known as Advanced Shader Delivery, which has been promised to Windows 11 gamers for later in 2026.

Intel clarified the situation for Tech Power Up: "Intel Precompiled Shaders is custom-built and run by Intel. We are also working with Microsoft on launching Advanced Shader Delivery later this year. Together, both services will provide users of supported Arc GPUs with more game and game store coverage of technologies that reduce waiting times and in-game stutters due to shader compilation."

So this won't be limited to Steam in the future, as you might expect.

If you're thinking that Precompiled Shaders — which is still labelled as a beta feature at this point — is just going to speed up things in a once-and-done kind of way, that's not strictly true. Yes, the game goes through this sometimes seriously demanding shader compilation process when you first run it, and that's all done and dusted thereafter — well, sort of.

The trouble is that the game may need to recompile the shaders in certain scenarios, such as after a new GPU driver update or game update. And when a game has a particularly lengthy compilation process, this can be a major annoyance. On top of that, compiling shaders can happen on-the-fly in the game, which can lead to stuttering, something that the Precompiled Shaders feature avoids entirely.

You can see why this is a very useful advance, then, even if it only applies in certain scenarios (and with supported games). And it's really useful for some handhelds, too — like the MSI Claw 8 AI+, which has an Intel Lunar Lake processor — where shader compilation can be a draining task that hits the battery hard if you're away from a power socket.

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Darren is a freelancer writing news and features for Tech Radar (and occasionally T3) across a broad range of computing topics including CPUs, GPUs, various other hardware, VPNs, antivirus and more. He has written about tech for the best part of three decades, and writes books in his spare time (his debut novel - 'I Know What You Did Last Supper' - was published by Hachette UK in 2013).

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Key Takeaways

• Hate waiting for games to load

• Precompiled Shaders is a real timesaver — situationally — for Battlemage desktop GPUs, and integrated Xe 2 or Xe 3 graphics

• When you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission

• It introduces a Precompiled Shaders feature to help supported games load faster

• This is a situational benefit, but it'll apply more often than you think