We don’t have any plans for async compute on PC yet. We barely leverage async compute on consoles, and that needs to happen first, then we need to get our d3d12 RHI to parity with d3d11, which also hasn’t been accomplished yet. It’s a surprising amount of work.
I’d like to keep shadows deferred in the forward path as it allows sharing all the same shadowing features with deferred and it’s really powerful to be able to decouple shading from shadowing methods like that. Even UE3 leveraged deferred shadows. However if we can’t find a way to make deferred shadowing work efficiently with MSAA we may have to switch to forward shadowing, which will be a lot of work (reimplement every shadowing method).