VulkanFlow

VulkanFlow

A Shader Mod for Low End Hardware.

Welcome to VulkanFlow! This mod integrates Shader effects directly into the Minecraft rendering pipeline without destroying your framerate. It is made for players on laptops or older PCs that just want to play shaders without playing on really low fps. I made this mod because I wanted to play with Shaders on my iGPU, so I made this solution.

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Features

VulkanFlow 1.0 packs a ton of features to make your game look great without killing your FPS:

• Bloom: Threshold and separable blur for a smooth highlight roll-off around light sources.
• Wind: Smoother, height-weighted swaying for leaves and foliage. Tall plants and stalks bend as one.
• Screen-space shadows: Ambient occlusion and shadows cast towards the real sun direction.
• Atmosphere & Weather: God rays, underwater light shafts, a rain veil, wet glossy surfaces, and sparkling snow.
• Night sky: Stars, a faint Milky Way, a moon with real phases, and slow-moving Auroras.
• Water depth: Water gets darker and more turquoise the deeper it goes, complete with soft shores and foam.
• Details: Depth of field, cinematic vignette, drifting particles (pollen by day, fireflies by night), and colored light source glow.
• Strength sliders: Almost every effect has a 0–10 slider in the Sodium settings so you can tweak it to your liking.

Performance & Quality

• Automatic Quality: Just set a target FPS. If your framerate drops, the mod automatically scales back effects based on their performance cost to keep your game running smooth.
• Fused effect chains: Atmosphere, clouds, reflections, and shadows run as a single chain to save on full-screen copies.
• Optimized processing: Far less CPU work per frame, cheaper sky-cloud marching, and fewer depth fetches in the shadow mask.

Commands

• /vulkanflow quality - Shows your current automatic quality level.
• /vulkanflow perf - Measures the CPU cost of the rendering stages.
• /vulkanflow bench - Benchmarks the GPU cost of each effect group directly on your machine.
• /vulkanflow fuse - Toggles fused chains on/off so you can compare performance.

Why VulkanFlow?

Standard shaders (via Iris or OptiFine) usually drops your framerate on integrated graphics cards because they force heavy calculations into a single frame. VulkanFlow takes a different approach based on the following techniques:":

• Time Slicing:
• The mod distributes the rendering load across multiple frames, smoothing out frame spikes.
• Vulkan & OpenGL Fallback: Designed to hook directly into Minecraft's new Vulkan pipeline while maintaining OpenGL fallback.
• Made for iGPUs: Specifically optimized and tested to maintain a stable 60 FPS on hardware like the Intel UHD 620 (tested on a ThinkPad T480).

Compatibility & Setup

• Sodium: Fully compatible! VulkanFlow is designed from the ground up to run alongside Sodium.
• No Iris / OptiFine Required: VulkanFlow runs as a completely standalone, lightweight graphics mod.

Installation: Right now you have to install Sodium to access the Settings Menu of the VulkanFlow mod.

Join the Community & Support

Want to report bugs, request features? Join our community on the official CraftingStudioPro Discord server!

FAQ

Is this mod paid/are some features paid? No, and they never will be! This mod will forever remain free for everyone to use.

Why is this mod in ALPHA? Currently, we are missing a lot of features. We hope to improve on these features as we drift towards a full release.

How can I contribute to the Vulkanflow Project? Simply play the mod! If you wish to join our team, please join our Discord. If you simply have an issue, please report it there - we look forwards to making this mod the best - the most bug-free - that it can be!

May I use this in my modpack? Yep, go ahead! Just give credit where it's due :D