All Minecraft Shaders

Four columns decide almost every choice on this page, and they are worth reading in a fixed order. The impact column is the memory budget the pack works to, so it tells you whether your machine is in the running at all. Compatibility tells you which loader you need. Version support rules out packs before you get as far as liking one. The category is last, because that is the only column that is a matter of taste rather than a matter of fact.

Sorted by impact, the catalogue is not evenly spread. Thirteen of the 31 packs sit at medium, which is the level where directional shadows, volumetric light and reflections become affordable on 2 GB of video memory. Seven sit at low impact on 1 GB, six at high impact on 3 to 4 GB, and five at ultra impact on 6 to 8 GB. In other words, two thirds of everything here runs on a card with 2 GB or less, and the heaviest fifth of the list asks for three to eight times that.

The loader column splits the field in a way that surprises people who have been on OptiFine for years. Twenty packs load under either Iris or OptiFine, six are Iris only, and five are OptiFine only. The Iris-only group is where most of the newer work is: Photon Shader, Rethinking Voxels, Hysteria Shaders, Shrimple, ARC Shaders and Soft Voxels Lite, though ARC itself stopped at 1.19.4. The OptiFine-only group is the older end, and it includes two of the most admired packs on the site, SEUS PTGI HRR and SEUS Renewed.

Version support is the column that ends the most conversations. Twenty-four of the 31 packs reach Minecraft 1.21, and nine of those have kept going into the 26 series: BSL Shaders, Complementary Reimagined, Complementary Unbound, Sildur's Vibrant Shaders, Miniature Shader, MakeUp Ultra Fast, AstraLex Shaders and Noble Shaders all list files for 26.2, and Photon Shader for 26.1.2. The seven that stop earlier are SEUS Renewed, SEUS PTGI HRR and Continuum Shaders at 1.20.4, Chocapic13's Shaders and Soft Voxels Lite at 1.20.1, ARC Shaders at 1.19.4 and ProjectLUMA at 1.14.4, and none of them is coming back. At the other end, five packs still load on 1.7.10, which covers most modpacks that never moved on: BSL Shaders, Sildur's Vibrant Shaders, Chocapic13's Shaders, MakeUp Ultra Fast and Beyond Belief Shaders.

The creator column is worth a glance for a reason that is not obvious. Twenty-five different authors are represented, but four of them appear more than once, and one, RRe36, has four packs here at three different levels of cost. If you have found a pack whose look you like, the fastest way to find another is often the same name rather than the same category, because a maker's taste in colour and contrast carries across their work more reliably than a category label does.

What the table deliberately does not have is a frame rate column. A frame rate depends on your render distance, your world, your resolution and what else the machine is doing, so a number quoted without those four attached is not a measurement of anything. The memory figures do not move, which is why they are the ones published here and on every pack page behind this list.