Performance Shaders
Lightweight shaders optimized for smooth gameplay on lower-end hardware without sacrificing too much visual quality.
A lightweight Iris shader from Null, the author of Shrimple. ARC delivers colored block lighting and clean shadows with minimal performance cost, and its last published build targets 1.19.4.
Null doing coloured lighting on a 1 GB budget, with soft shadows and a clean palette that stays out of the way. It runs from 1.16, and its last build was for 1.19.4.
Designed for maximum performance on low-end hardware. MakeUp Ultra Fast delivers the core shader experience with shadows, bloom, and godrays while keeping FPS high.
The widest net in the category: 1.7.10 through 26.2 on either loader. Shadows, godrays and waving plants at a cost most machines never notice, which makes it the realistic answer for an old modpack.
A simple, lightweight shader focused on colored block light and clean visuals. Shrimple is designed for Iris and prioritizes performance while adding meaningful visual improvements.
Coloured lighting at 1 GB, which is the effect most people assume is out of reach on this hardware. A torch throws warm light on the wall beside it and a soul lantern throws cold. Iris only, from 1.16.5.
A lighter take on voxel-based lighting. Provides colored block lighting and soft shadows with moderate performance impact, bridging the gap between lightweight and high-end shaders.
The only pack here that climbed a tier, and it did so to build a voxel model of the light around you. Coloured shadows fall the right way instead of being painted on, for 2 GB instead of 1 GB. Iris, 1.19 and newer.
An extremely lightweight shader that adds soft shadows, enhanced water, and subtle bloom. Runs on older hardware while adding a slight visual upgrade.
The softer alternative to MakeUp on the same budget. Fog and gentle water instead of godrays and hard contrast, so a forest reads as damp rather than as sharp.
What counts as a performance shader
This category exists for one question: how much can the picture improve before the frame rate stops being comfortable. Five packs answer it, four of them at low impact and one, Soft Voxels Lite, at medium. That single step up buys voxel-based lighting, which is worth knowing about because it is the cheapest way to get light that actually takes on the colour of the block it came from.
The four low-impact packs ask for 1 GB of video memory and 2 GB of system memory. That is a budget an integrated chip can meet, and it is the reason this category and the lightweight one carry most of the traffic from players on laptops. Soft Voxels Lite doubles both figures, to 2 GB and 4 GB, and in exchange it does something none of the other four attempt.
Loader support splits this group in a way it does not split the rest of the site. Shrimple, ARC Shaders and Soft Voxels Lite are Iris only, which on a slow machine is an advantage rather than a limitation, since Iris pairs with Sodium and starts from a higher frame rate. MakeUp Ultra Fast and Tea Shaders run on either loader, and MakeUp reaches all the way back to 1.7.10.
Which of the five to try first
MakeUp Ultra Fast by KDXavier is the widest net: every version from 1.7.10 to 26.2, both loaders, shadows and godrays and waving plants at a cost most machines never notice. Tea Shaders by unicornbloods trades the godrays for a softer, foggier look, and it is the one to try if MakeUp feels too sharp for the world you are building.
Shrimple and ARC Shaders, both written by Null, do coloured lighting at low impact, which is the effect people usually assume they cannot afford. A torch throws warm light, a soul lantern throws cold light, and neither pack charges the price the high-end category charges for the same idea. Both are Iris only, and ARC covers 1.16 up to 1.19.4 rather than the current release.
Soft Voxels Lite by RRe36 is the one to reach for once you know the machine has headroom. It builds a voxel model of the light around you, so coloured shadows fall the right way instead of being painted on, and it still fits in 2 GB of video memory. It runs from 1.19 to 1.20.1, the last version RRe36 built it for, and it will not load under OptiFine.
What you get to keep and what you give up
The honest way to describe this category is by what is missing. There is no depth of field, no motion blur, and no traced light in four of the five packs. Those are the three effects that cost the most, and leaving them out is how a shader fits inside 1 GB of video memory. What is left is the set that changes a scene the most per frame spent.
Directional shadows survive, and they are the single effect that does most of the work. A tree in vanilla Minecraft sits on the grass with nothing underneath it; with a shadow it sits in the grass. Enhanced water survives, which turns an ocean from a flat blue plane into something with a surface. Waving vegetation survives, which is cheap and stops a field from reading as painted on.
Two of the five, Shrimple and ARC Shaders, keep something that is normally the first thing cut: coloured lighting. A torch throws warm light onto the wall beside it, a soul lantern throws blue, and a lit sign of redstone lamps in a base reads as a different colour from the sunlight coming through the door. That effect is usually the reserve of packs that ask for six times the video memory, and it is worth knowing that it is available this far down the range.
What you give up is subtlety in the transitions. Shadow edges are harder here than in the medium tier, distant terrain gets less atmospheric fade, and clouds are simpler shapes. In motion, at a normal render distance, most of that goes unnoticed. In a still screenshot held next to a medium-impact pack, all of it is visible at once, which is why comparison shots make this category look worse than it plays.
Two neighbouring pages
This category is about how a pack was designed. The pages below are about what a pack costs and about how little it changes, which are related questions with different answers.
- Every low-impact pack: the same budget viewed as a hardware bracket, with the lightweight packs included.
- Lightweight shaders: the three packs that aim to keep the vanilla look rather than to fit a budget.
What the word performance is doing in a name
Every pack on this site could be called a performance shader by someone, which makes this the vaguest label in the catalogue. What it means here is specific: these five were designed from the start around a budget rather than trimmed down to fit one afterwards.
The difference shows in what is missing rather than in what is present. There is no depth of field and no motion blur anywhere in this category, because those are full-screen passes that cost the same regardless of what is on screen. Four of the five do not attempt traced light at all. What survives is the set of effects that changes a scene the most per frame spent.
It also shows in the choices around the edges. Three of the five run on Iris only, which is not a limitation on weak hardware but a decision: Iris runs next to Sodium, and Sodium raises the frame rate before the shader has done anything. Starting higher is worth more than any setting inside the pack.
The category most people confuse this one with is lightweight, and the difference is about intent rather than cost. Lightweight packs are trying to keep the vanilla look. These five are willing to change the picture, and two of them add coloured lighting, which no pack in the lightweight category attempts.
The cost you never see in a comparison
Comparisons between packs are almost always made on the same scene at the same moment, which is the one situation in which the packs on this page look weakest. It is worth knowing what that method leaves out.
The first omission is the worst case. What decides whether a session is comfortable is not the average frame rate but the moments when it drops: a busy scene, new terrain loading, a storm at night. Packs built to a budget tend to have shallower dips, and a still comparison cannot show that at all.
The second is memory pressure over time. A pack that fits comfortably at the start of a session and one that only just fits behave very differently an hour in, once the world around you has grown. That difference does not appear in any screenshot.
The third is what happens on someone else's machine. If you build for other people, the pack that looks best on your setup is not necessarily the one that makes your build look right on theirs, and this category is where the safest answers live.
Frames and feel are not the same thing
A steady frame rate is worth more than a high average, and on this hardware it is also easier to get. Capping the game slightly below what your machine can hold gives you consistency, quieter fans and a lower temperature, all at once, and the number you give up was never the part you could feel.
One last thing worth knowing
A pack from this page at its normal settings will nearly always look better and run better than a heavier pack turned down to its lowest preset. Crippling something built for a bigger budget is the least rewarding way to spend an evening.
A reasonable expectation
The packs here will not make your world look like the images that brought you to this site, and that is the deal rather than a shortcoming. What they do is turn a flat world into a lit one on hardware that has no business running any of this, and they do it without asking you to sit through a stutter every time something interesting happens.
Sorted by hardware instead
This page groups packs by what they are trying to look like. If the machine is the thing deciding for you, these two shortlists start from that end instead, and every entry says why it made the cut.
Last updated . This page is rebuilt when its own figures change, not on every deploy.