Photon Shaders

A gameplay-focused shader pack for Minecraft

Acknowledgments

• Menu translations:
  • NakiriRuri and OrzMiku - Chinese Simplified (China; Mandarin)
  • ChunghwaMC - Chinese Traditional (Taiwan; Mandarin)
  • Jmayk - Italian
  • Timtaran - Russian
  • sincerity - Estonian
  • Patatagod69 - Dutch
• Emin - Shadow bias method from Complementary Reimagined (fully fixes peter panning and light leaking underground!)
• DrDesten - Depth tolerance calculation for SSR (helps to prevent false reflections)
• Jessie - f0 and f82 values for labPBR hardcoded metals
• Sledgehammer Games - Bloom downsampling method used in Call of Duty Advanced Warfare (described here)
• http://momentsingrapics.de/ - Blue noise texture
• NASA Scientific Visualization Studio - Galaxy image

Installation

• Photon can be used with Iris (recommended) or OptiFine
• Iris is a modern shader loader with far better performance, mod compatibility and developer features than OptiFine. Some features (Colored Lighting) will only work on Iris
• Once you have your preferred shader loader installed, simply place the downloaded zip file in your .minecraft/shaderpacks folder

Downloads

• Releases (recommended)
• Stable
• Unstable

Features

• Fully revamped sky, lighting and water
• Detailed clouds with many layers and cloud types
• Immersive weather system providing different skies each day
• Voxel-based colored lighting (enabled with Ultra profile, requires Iris)
• Screen-space reflections
• Volumetric fog
• Soft shadows with variable-size penumbras
• Detailed ambient occlusion (GTAO)
• Camera effects: bloom, depth of field, motion blur
• Much improved image quality with TAA, FXAA and CAS
• Advanced temporal upscaling (disabled by default) for low end devices
• Extensive settings menu allowing you to customize every aspect of the shader
• Full labPBR resource pack support

Compatibility

• Nvidia, AMD and Intel GPUs
• Iris - version 1.5 and above
• OptiFine - on Minecraft 1.16.5 and above
• Photon is also compatible with Distant Horizons
• Apple Metal: Disable SH Skylight and Colored Shadows

Showcase videos

by iambeen

by CosmicNexus

by VIPUL

Community

• For questions, suggestions and news regarding this shader pack, head to my discord server
• You can also give me money if you want to