How to Install Minecraft Shaders

Iris vs OptiFine

Install with Iris (Fabric)

Install with OptiFine

Tips for Best Performance

Which pack to load first

The loader is the hard part and you have just done it. Picking the first pack is easier than it looks, because the answer is almost always the one your graphics card can hold without you having to touch a single setting afterwards.

On an older laptop or an integrated chip, start with Tea Shaders or MakeUp Ultra Fast. On a card from the last five years, BSL Shaders and Complementary Reimagined are the two that get recommended most often, and both look finished out of the box. If you came here to see what the hardware is capable of at full stretch, load SEUS PTGI HRR or Rethinking Voxels and expect to give up frames for it.

If you would rather see the packs already sorted by what your machine can take, these shortlists do that work for you, and every one of them says why a pack made the cut instead of only listing it.

• Best shaders for low-end PCs
• Best shaders for mid-range PCs
• Best shaders for high-end PCs
• Best shaders for survival play
• Best shaders for Minecraft 1.21

Where the shaderpacks folder lives

The quickest route is the button in the game itself: Options, then Video Settings, then Shader Packs, then Open Shader Pack Folder. That opens the right folder on any system and saves you from guessing. If the game will not start, here is where that folder lives on each system.

When it does not work

Ten things that go wrong, in the order we are asked about them, with what actually fixes each one.

1. The shader pack does not show up in the list

   Nine times out of ten the file is in the wrong shape rather than the wrong place. A shader pack belongs in the shaderpacks folder as the .zip you downloaded, not unzipped, and not as a zip inside another zip. Some browsers unpack archives on download, which leaves you with a folder that the game will happily ignore. Check that the folder contains a single .zip with the pack name on it, then press the refresh button on the shader screen.

2. The screen is black, purple or full of stretched colours

   That is almost always a version mismatch: the pack was built for a different Minecraft release than the one you are running. Open the pack page here, read the version range, and download the build that lists your client version. If your version is outside the range, no setting inside the pack will fix it. The same symptom shows up when two rendering mods are loaded next to each other, so start the game once with only Iris and Sodium before adding anything else.

3. The game crashes as soon as I enable the shader

   Iris and Sodium have to match your Minecraft version exactly, and the pair is released together for a reason. A crash on enable usually means one of the two is from a different version, or that a second optimisation mod is trying to do the same job. Remove everything except Iris and Sodium, confirm the shader loads, then add your other mods back one at a time.

4. The shader options are greyed out or say shaders are not supported

   Then the loader is not actually running. With OptiFine that means the launcher profile is still the vanilla one; with Iris it means the Fabric profile was not selected, or the mod file sits in the wrong folder. Look at the bottom left of the title screen: it names the loader when one is active.

5. My frame rate collapsed after installing a shader

   Move the shadow settings first. Shadow resolution and shadow distance cost more than anything else in almost every pack, and halving them changes the picture far less than turning the render distance down. Volumetric lighting is the next one to try, and it only earns its cost in scenes with something in the air. If a pack is still unplayable after that, it is the wrong tier for your card rather than the wrong settings.

6. Everything is too dark and the brightness slider does nothing

   That is expected. Most packs take over the lighting completely, which makes the vanilla brightness slider and night vision effects meaningless. Look inside the pack's own settings screen instead: nearly every pack has an exposure, gamma or brightness value there, and that is the one that works.

7. Water, leaves or metal look wrong with my texture pack

   Shader packs and resource packs both describe surfaces, and they can disagree. A pack with PBR support expects material maps that a plain texture pack does not ship, so surfaces fall back to a flat response. Either use a resource pack that includes those maps, or turn the PBR option off in the shader settings and let the pack use its own defaults.

8. Does any of this work on a Mac with an M chip

   Iris on Fabric is the route that gives the least trouble on Apple Silicon. OptiFine support on those machines has been uneven for years, and several packs here are Iris only anyway. Expect to sit a tier lower than the same money would buy you in a desktop card.

9. Can I install a shader on my Minecraft server

   No, and it is worth knowing why: a shader is a client side pack. It changes how your own copy of the game draws the world, so it never touches the server and the server cannot hand it to anyone. Everyone who wants to see the same lighting installs the pack themselves. What a server does give you is a world that stays there, with other people in it, which is the part a shader has nothing to say about.

10. Do shaders work on Bedrock Edition

    Not these ones. Every pack on this site is for Java Edition, which uses a renderer that Iris and OptiFine can hook into. Bedrock has its own add-on system and its own rendering path, and a Java shader pack will not load there in any form.