Vitrail Shaders

OptiFine-format shader packs, on Minecraft's native Vulkan renderer

Minecraft ships a native Vulkan renderer alongside the OpenGL one. Every shader pack that exists today was written for OpenGL, and none of them run on it.

Vitrail runs them anyway, unmodified. It reads an OptiFine-format pack out of shaderpacks/, translates its GLSL once when the pack loads, and runs the frame on the Vulkan backend. What reaches the driver is SPIR-V, compiled at load time, not a shim running inside every frame.

Before you install: it is a beta

• The Vulkan backend is experimental, marked so by the game itself: the setting you have to turn on reads "Prefer Vulkan (Experimental)".
• The world goes through your pack. A few families of geometry do not yet, and some come out wrong rather than absent, which on some packs shows the moment you load a world. What is through moves release by release.
• It is one person's side project, and it is not finished.
• If what you want today is a finished picture, use Iris on the OpenGL backend instead. It does that job well, and it is the reference this engine is checked against.

Bring your own pack

Vitrail is the engine, not the pack, and it can ship none: the packs belong to their authors and their licences do not allow redistribution. These are the ones I run against daily.

• Complementary Unbound / Reimagined / Euphoria Patches
• BSL
• Bliss
• Mellow
• Body Camera

Sildur's Vibrant draws except for its water. Reverie is refused at load, declaring graphics features this backend does not serve. A pack absent from this list is one I have not loaded, not one that is unsupported: the table of packs actually tried says what I have seen with each.

After you install

• Switch the game to Vulkan and restart it. Video Settings, "Prefer Vulkan (Experimental)". The backend is picked when the game boots, so it takes effect on the next launch.
• If the frame rate comes up short, there is a slider for it. Video Settings, on Vitrail's own page, "FSR Render Scale": the world is drawn at 25 to 100 percent of the window and brought back to full size before the interface, so menus, chat and the F3 screen stay sharp whatever the scale.
• Distant Horizons is compatible, and your pack's own DH programs draw its far terrain. On Fabric, install it like any other mod. On NeoForge its current release still crashes on the Vulkan renderer (its own texture unwrapper, not this mod), so install this build by hand instead.
• If you run Chloride, five of its settings have to come off: Fast Chests and Fast Beds on the Performance page, Max Entity Distance, Max Monster Distance and Max Block Entity Distance on the Entities page. Chloride is not required and is not installed for you. Vitrail names any it finds on in the log at startup.

Client only, and do not run another shader engine alongside. The install guide has the rest.

Links and credits

Source, what goes through a pack today and the full compatibility notes are all at Vitrail-Shaders.

LGPL-3.0-only. Vitrail reuses code from Iris under the same licence, the implementation the packs are written against today. What was taken is recorded file by file in the project's NOTICE.