(Image credit: Infinity Ward)

In the era of speedy solid state drives, I barely remember the last time I saw a loading screen. I say 'barely' because it was, in fact, last night as I waited for Star Wars Zero Company to compile its shaders for a second time following a crash I encountered during the tutorial mission. Some of us are just blessed (read: cursed) like that. Thankfully, more and more games are moving towards pre-compiling shaders.

Case in point, Nvidia just released a fresh GeForce Game Ready Driver that adds support for Advanced Shader Delivery in both Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 4 and Gears of War: E-Day . I've not had a chance to test the Nvidia GeForce 621.01 WHQL driver yet, but journalist Sebastian Castellanos notes "considerably lower system RAM usage" with it installed.

He wrote on X , "In Gears of War: E-Day, [RAM usage is] about 7-8 GB lower in my case.…