Radeon targets the waits and hitches players feel before frame counts matter
RX 9070 XT in a test scenario where shader delivery becomes part of performance.📷 AI-generated image / TECH&SPACE
- ★Tom's Hardware tested Advanced Shader Delivery on the RX 9070 XT across six games.
- ★The largest measured gain was up to 95% shorter loading and up to 33% better 1% Low FPS.
- ★ASD matters for game feel because it targets shader-related waiting and hitching, not just average FPS.
Tom's Hardware tested Advanced Shader Delivery on the Radeon RX 9070 XT, a new gaming feature aimed at something average-FPS charts often blur away: load times and 1% Low FPS. Across six games, the test recorded up to 95% better loading times and up to 33% better 1% Low FPS in some titles.
This is not the same story as a conventional performance uplift from more cores, higher clocks or a wider memory bus. The focus is when and how a game receives the shaders it needs. Shader compilation has been one of PC gaming’s recurring annoyances for years: a game can post a respectable average frame rate and still feel rough if it has to build or fetch parts of the rendering path at the wrong moment.
The RX 9070 XT matters here because this is a current Radeon gaming card, not a lab-only reference board detached from buyers. AMD’s own page for Radeon desktop graphics frames the lineup around gaming hardware, while the user-facing control layer sits in AMD Software: Adrenalin Edition. Advanced Shader Delivery should therefore be read as part of a broader shift: the driver, cache and pipeline are becoming as visible to the experience as the GPU specification itself.
Tom's Hardware measured up to 95% shorter load times and up to 33% better 1% Low FPS across six games, but this is an experience optimization, not a magic FPS switch.
Shader cache and frame-time stability matter beyond average FPS alone.📷 AI-generated image / TECH&SPACE
The most interesting part of the test is not only the 95% figure. It is striking, but a peak result should always be treated as a best case, not a promise for every game. What matters more is the direction of travel: some waiting and hitching can be attacked systematically before the player reduces every problem to whether they need a faster graphics card.
1% Low FPS is the sharper signal here. Average FPS can look tidy while the bottom edge of performance falls apart. When 1% Low improves, a game usually feels steadier because the worst short drops are less frequent or less severe. That makes the reported gain of up to 33% in that metric more relevant to game feel than a dry loading-time headline might suggest.
There is also a wider industry context. PC gaming increasingly depends on complex rendering chains, modern APIs, shader caches and data handoff between the game, driver and operating system. Microsoft’s documentation for Direct3D 12 shows how explicit and management-heavy the graphics pipeline has become. In that world, optimizing shader delivery is not cosmetic. It is an attempt to move one of the PC platform’s most visible weak points toward a more systematic solution.
The pragmatic conclusion is simple: Advanced Shader Delivery will not turn every game into a perfectly smooth experience, and it does not remove the need for good PC ports. But if results like these prove repeatable across more titles, AMD has a concrete argument that does not fit neatly into the usual average-FPS debate. Faster loading and a steadier lower edge of performance are not a marketing detail. They are exactly what players notice before they start counting frames.
