High-End Shaders

This is the ceiling of the site. Five packs, all ultra impact, all built around light that is traced rather than approximated, and all asking for hardware that most Minecraft players do not have. SEUS PTGI HRR, Photon Shader and Rethinking Voxels want 6 GB of video memory. Continuum Shaders and Hysteria Shaders want 8 GB. Every one of them wants 8 GB of system memory behind it.

What the money buys is light that comes from somewhere. A torch in a corridor lights the wall it is on and the floor under it in the colour of its own flame; sunlight coming through a window falls on the floor and bounces up onto the ceiling. Screen-space packs cannot do the second half of that, because the light source has to already be on screen.

The version support is the thing to check before anything else, because it is scattered. SEUS PTGI HRR runs from 1.16.5 to 1.20.4 and Continuum Shaders from 1.12.2 to 1.20.4, so neither reaches 1.21. Photon Shader covers 1.19 to 26.1.2, Rethinking Voxels 1.19 to 1.21.10, and Hysteria Shaders only 1.20 to 1.21.3. Three of the five are Iris only.

SEUS PTGI HRR by Sonic Ether is the pack that made this category exist, with full path tracing plus ray-traced reflections and shadows, and caustics under water that no screen-space pack can reproduce. It is OptiFine only and it stops at 1.20.4, which is the price of being the oldest implementation here.

Photon Shader by SixthSurge and Rethinking Voxels by gri573 are the two current options for a 1.21 world. Photon does path-traced global illumination with a clean, neutral grade; Rethinking Voxels builds a voxel model of the scene, which gives coloured lighting that stays correct around corners rather than only where the camera is pointing.

Continuum Shaders by Continuum Graphics and Hysteria Shaders by ElocinDev are the two 8 GB packs. Continuum is the older of the two and stops at 1.20.4; Hysteria combines voxel global illumination with path tracing and needs 1.20 or newer. Neither is a pack you load to play a normal survival session on a mid-range card.

Put a torch in a corner of a stone room under a screen-space pack and the wall behind the torch lights up, because the wall is on screen. Turn around so the torch is behind you and the light on the floor in front of you disappears, because the source has left the frame. Nobody notices this while playing, and once you have seen it you cannot stop noticing it.

The five packs on this page do not have that problem, because they follow light through the scene rather than across the screen. The consequence you actually see is bounced colour. Sunlight coming through a window falls on an oak floor, picks up its warmth, and lifts the ceiling above it. A room lit only by lava glows red on every surface, including the ones the lava cannot see directly. In a base built underground, this is the difference between rooms that look lit and rooms that look painted.

Caustics are the effect that three of these five list, and they are worth a mention because nothing outside this page reproduces them. Light passing through water focuses into moving bright patterns on whatever is underneath. Stand in a shallow river at midday and the riverbed ripples with them. SEUS PTGI HRR, Photon Shader and Hysteria Shaders all do it; Rethinking Voxels and Continuum Shaders do not, and their water is the poorer for it. It is a small effect that sells a lake more thoroughly than any reflection does.

Rethinking Voxels and Hysteria Shaders reach the same destination by a different road. Instead of tracing rays through the world geometry, they build a simplified voxel model of your surroundings and light from that. It costs less, it stays correct behind you, and it is slightly coarser on fine detail. In a room full of torches you will not tell the two approaches apart; on the edge of a thin structure against a bright sky, you might.

Everything on this page traces light in some form, and the marketing images look interchangeable until you know where to look. Four details separate them, and all four are visible in a still.

Start with a corner where two walls meet under a single light source. Under a screen-space pack the corner darkens evenly. Under path tracing the wall opposite the light picks up its colour, so a torch beside oak planks leaves a warm cast on the stone across from it. That colour bleed is the single clearest sign that light is being traced rather than approximated.

Next, look for a light source that is off the edge of the frame. Screen-space methods can only reflect and bounce what the camera can see, so a bright window just outside the shot contributes nothing. In a path-traced or voxel-lit scene that window still lights the room, which is why interiors are where the difference is most obvious.

Third, water in daylight. Only three packs on this page list caustics: SEUS PTGI HRR, Photon Shader and Hysteria Shaders. If the riverbed carries moving bright patterns rather than a flat blue tint, you are looking at one of those three, or at an image from a pack outside this site.

Fourth, the edges of thin structures against a bright sky. Voxel-based lighting, as in Rethinking Voxels and Hysteria Shaders, builds a simplified block model of the world and lights from that, so a fence or a thin pillar can show slightly coarser shading along its edge than a fully traced pack would. It is a small tell, and it is the trade that makes voxel lighting cheaper and more stable behind you.

None of these four is a quality ranking. They are four different answers to the same problem, and the right one depends on whether your world is mostly indoors, mostly water, or mostly open sky.

The gap between this category and everything else is larger than the memory figures suggest, and the reason is worth a paragraph, because it explains why the gap is not closing quickly.

Approximating light is cheap because the work is bounded. Draw the scene once from the sun's point of view and you have shadows. Reuse the image already on screen and you have reflections. Both cost a predictable amount per frame regardless of how complicated the lighting actually is.

Tracing light is unbounded by nature. Every ray you follow can spawn more, and the honest version of the calculation needs far more of them than any machine can afford in a sixtieth of a second. So every pack here fires a small number of rays and then reconstructs a clean image from a noisy one, and that reconstruction is where most of the cleverness and most of the cost lives.

It also explains the two things people notice and cannot name. The faint trail behind bright objects when you turn quickly is the reconstruction reusing information from previous frames, which is how it affords a clean image at all. The occasional speckle in a dark corner is the opposite case, where too little information reached that spot to reconstruct anything confident.

Neither is a defect to be fixed with a setting, and both get better with more rays, which costs exactly what you would expect. That trade is the whole of this category.

Images from this category travel further than any others, and they are also the most likely to have been helped. A still can be given far more time than a frame in motion has, so the version you saw in a thumbnail may be a scene that took seconds to settle rather than sixtieths.

That is not dishonesty, it is what these packs are for. But it does mean the fair comparison to make before buying hardware is a video of someone moving, not a gallery of stills.

Nothing on this page is a daily driver for most machines, and treating it as one is how people end up disappointed by software that is working exactly as intended. Load it for a build you want to look at, for a shot you want to keep, or for an evening where the point is the view. Keep something lighter installed for the sessions where the point is the game.

The screenshots on the pack pages behind this category come from each pack's own author, because a scene set up by the person who wrote the lighting is the fairest showing it can get. Our own images are the comparison shots, taken in one world from one position so the only thing that differs between two of them is the setting being described.