VulkanMod-legacy

VulkanMod112

Minecraft 1.12.2 draws its world with Vulkan instead of OpenGL — and brings along a menu full of effects you build yourself, plus the settings that actually decide a framerate in this version.

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In short

• More frames, especially at high render distances, where the biggest single cost is the game working out which chunks are on screen.
• Effects with a slider each — waves, reflections, refraction, bloom, ambient occlusion, swaying grass, ray-traced shadows — assembled from rows in a menu instead of loaded from somebody's zip. Every one off by default.
• Dynamic lights. A torch in your hand lights the world. So does one you dropped, and a mob that is on fire.
• The settings 1.12.2 never gave you: entity draw distance, animated-texture control, a background framerate cap, render distance up to 64, hold-to-zoom.
• It steps aside if anything goes wrong. No Vulkan, an old driver, two graphics cards that disagree — the game renders exactly as it always did and tells you why.

You need MixinBooter in your mods folder. No launcher installs it for you.

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What you actually see

The world's blocks and its creatures are drawn by Vulkan; the sky, chests and signs, and the interface are still drawn by the game. Everything lines up, because both sides share the same depth buffer. Nothing about how you play changes — you get the same world, drawn by a newer path, with a menu attached.

Open it at Options → Video Settings → VulkanMod112 Settings…, or press F6.

Every setting tells you what it costs on your processor, your graphics card and in video memory separately — because which of the three you are short of decides whether a setting will help you at all. If you would rather not read any of it, there are three presets: Stable, Balanced, Performance.

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Effects

Off by default, all of them. Turn on what you like the look of.

• Water. Waves that break the sky up along their crests, a fresnel term so the surface looks along itself the way water does, reflections of the bank it runs beside, and refraction — the bed moving under the surface instead of sitting there like a photograph behind glass.
• Ray-traced shadows. Real shadows from the sun, from a torch in your hand, from a burning creature, and from the torches already on the walls. Sharp or soft, on a slider. This needs a card that can trace rays and it is not free — it is the one thing here that will cost you frames.
• Bloom. Light spills off lava, torches, glowstone and any modded block that gives off light — and only those. Snow in sunlight is as bright on screen as lava and does not glow, because glowing is a fact about a block rather than about a pixel.
• Ambient occlusion. Shadow in corners, under overhangs, where a wall meets a floor. The game shades a face by which way it points and by nothing else, so an inside corner is lit exactly like open wall; this fills that in.
• Swaying grass and flowers, leaning in waves that travel across a field rather than each plant twitching on its own.
• Grass lit as a bush rather than as two flat boards. Raise a torch over grass in vanilla and nothing happens while the ground beside it brightens. Here it lights.
• A round sun and moon, with size and warmth on sliders. The moon keeps its phases.
• Frame averaging, which is what turns the grain of a traced shadow into a soft edge.
• The whole picture graded. Contrast lifted through the middle, warmth put into the balance — the thing that separates a shader pack's frame from the game's before any single effect is named. It reaches creatures, particles and weather as well as the blocks, and stops before your hand and the interface.
• The sun glinting off water, and the moon at night. A narrow bright streak that moves with the ripples — what a reflection cannot give you, because a mirror shows what is behind you and a glint shows where the light is.
• Ice that gathers the sky, caustics banding the bed of shallow water, rain that darkens and wets what it falls on, fog leaning warm towards the sun, and clouds taking the colour of the sky they hang in rather than staying white in an orange sunset.
• A time of day and a weather of your own, on your screen only. Nothing is sent to a server and nothing is written to the world — mobs still burn at dawn, and a storm the server believes in still charges a creeper.

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Speed

• Entity and block-entity draw distance. The single biggest win in mob farms, storage rooms and busy servers — vanilla decides per object from its size, which for large mobs reaches far past anything you can make out.
• Animated textures. Water, lava, fire, portals and every animated modded block upload a new frame every tick whether they are on screen or not.
• Background framerate cap. With the frame limit on "unlimited", a minimised Minecraft otherwise keeps your card at full load drawing frames nobody can see.
• Render distance up to 64 chunks, for people who want to find out what their machine does with that.
• Offscreen chunk preloading, so the world stops filling in only along whatever you happen to be looking at.
• One copy of the world instead of two. Normally the blocks sit in both the game's memory and this mod's. Turning this on frees around a gigabyte of video memory.
• Cleaner distant snow. Distant snow layers stop speckling with the block underneath them.
• A budget for explosion particles. A large charge of TNT asks for tens of thousands of particles in a single tick; past the limit one in eight is kept, because cutting off entirely leaves a hole where the blast was biggest.
• Hold-to-zoom on C, rebindable, with mouse sensitivity scaled to match.

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Honest limits

This is not a drop-in OptiFine replacement, and it is not finished.

• Not every effect reaches everything. Two of them — the corner shading of the whole scene and the grading — run over the finished picture, so they reach creatures, particles and other mods' content for free. The rest are computed while the blocks are drawn and stop there. A burning creeper still does not glow: what glows is recorded per block while a chunk is built, and a creeper is not a block.
• Creatures are drawn by Vulkan by default, which is what gives them a shadow of their own shape instead of vanilla's round blur. A mod that builds its creatures with its own drawing code rather than out of the game's model parts is left to the game, as are chests, signs and machines. The red flash when something is hurt and the shimmer on enchanted armour are missing here — the game does not draw either of them as a colour, it builds both out of a fixed-function texture stage this renderer no longer has once it is the one drawing. If you would rather have the flash, Draw Creatures in Vulkan turns it off; the cost is that the player then reaches the shadow passes twice and leaves a faint trail of light behind while flying.
• Screen reflections reflect what is on the screen — that is the whole of what the technique can do, anywhere it is used. Nothing off the edge of the frame, nothing hidden behind something nearer. Treat this one as unfinished.
• Chunk building dominates the frame while you move at high render distances. Standing still is much faster than turning, and that is the game's own work rather than this mod's.
• OptiFine and shader mods replace the same parts of the game this mod does. With one of them installed the Vulkan renderer simply does not load, and you get that renderer plus this mod's settings and speed options. They cannot share the world.
• No connected textures, and no shader pack support.

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Requirements

• Minecraft 1.12.2 with Forge, or Cleanroom — both are tested
• MixinBooter 10.7 or newer — a required dependency, and no launcher installs it
• A 64-bit Vulkan driver on Windows or Linux. Almost any driver from the last several years will do; without one the mod loads, says so in chat, and leaves the world to OpenGL
• On a machine with two graphics cards, both halves have to land on the same one. The mod checks at startup and stays on vanilla rendering if they disagree
• AMD and NVIDIA, Windows and Linux, all four combinations are run. They are not the same path: where a card cannot hand back its depth in the format the game keeps, this mod hands it over through a shader instead. That second path is the one that is easy to get wrong and hard to notice, so it is exercised deliberately rather than hoped for. Intel graphics should work and has not been tried — if you are on one, a bug report with the diagnostics file is genuinely useful

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Big modpacks

Tested in one rather than guessed at. All the Mods 3 Remix — around 340 mods, thirty loading plugins of their own, and most of the 1.12.2 optimisation shelf already inside it: FoamFix, BetterFps, Clumps, FastFurnace, AI Improvements, RandomPatches. It loads, it draws its world through this renderer, and it does it on the Beautiful preset with every effect switched on.

Nothing in that pack had to be removed to make room. The frame cost measured there was the same as on a bare instance — a fraction of a millisecond to record and submit, well under a tenth of the frame — which is the point: this mod replaces how the world is drawn, and a pack adds what there is to draw, so the two do not compete.

Two things worth knowing before you try it on a pack of that vintage:

• MixinBooter has to load before any mod that carries its own copy of Mixin. Some older library mods bundle Mixin 0.7.11, Forge hands the package to whichever jar sorts first by file name, and MixinBooter then fails inside itself. Renaming its jar so it sorts first — aaa_mixinbooter-…jar — settles it. This is true of any pack that age, with or without this mod.
• Nothing here replaces a lighting-engine mod such as Phosphor, or a memory one such as FoamFix. Those work on the world; this works on the picture. Keep them.

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Questions

Will this give me more frames? Usually yes, and most at high render distances. How much depends far more on what is in front of you than on your hardware — the biggest saving is in how the game decides which chunks to draw, so it grows with the render distance. The effects are a separate question: those cost frames, and each one says how much before you turn it on.

How long does it take to turn an effect on? A frame. There is no pack to load here: an effect is a row in a menu with a number beside it, and moving that number changes the next picture the card draws. Switching a shader pack on or off in the usual way means compiling a few hundred programs and reloading the world, and it is long enough that you stop doing it — which is the real cost, because the way you find the settings you like is by flicking them back and forth.

Two honest exceptions. A handful of settings are recorded into a chunk while it is being built rather than read while it is drawn — what a block is made of, for one — so those rebuild the world, which takes a few seconds and says so. Ray tracing has to be asked for when the graphics device is created, so it takes effect at the next start and the mod tells you in chat.

Do I need OptiFine as well? Can I have both? You can have both installed, but not both drawing. With OptiFine present the Vulkan renderer stands aside and you keep this mod's menu, its speed settings and its zoom. If you want the effects here, run without OptiFine.

Will it work with my modpack? It is built to. Everything it touches has a fallback, and anything it does not understand is left to the game. If a mod draws the world in its own way, this one notices and steps back rather than fighting it.

Does it work in multiplayer? Yes. Nothing here is sent to a server and nothing needs to be installed on one — it only changes how your own machine draws what it is already told.

My game crashed / the world looks wrong. What do you need? One file: logs/latest.log. Play for about a minute with the world visible first — that is all the preparation there is, and you do not have to change a setting or repeat anything.

This is deliberate. A picture that comes out wrong has a handful of possible causes that look identical on screen — the world never arrived, a copy the driver quietly refused, a pass that stood down, an effect that graded it away — and telling them apart used to mean asking someone to restart the game once for each guess. So the renderer now reads back a pixel of its own frame at three points and writes what it found, in plain numbers, into that file, without being asked and whatever your settings are. Those numbers separate all four before anyone has to ask you anything.

If you would like to go further, turn on Ultra Logging and send logs/vulkanmod112-diagnostics.log as well: it adds your driver, your mods, every active code path and where the frame's time went. Useful, but no longer the price of entry.

Nothing happened when I installed it. Almost always the missing MixinBooter. Second most likely: an OptiFine or shader mod is present, and the terrain renderer stood aside for it. Both cases say so in the log, and the settings screen tells you which renderer is drawing.

Will there be a version for a newer Minecraft? 1.14.4 and 1.16.5 are wanted, but not soon — and there is no date, because saying one would be inventing it. 1.12.2 comes first: it is stuck on an old renderer and a huge number of packs are stuck on it, which is the whole reason this mod exists. Anything past 1.16.5 is not planned at all; those versions have other options.

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Licence

GNU LGPL v3.