RenderPearl - Modern Lightweight Shaders for Iris

RenderPearl is an ultra-lightweight shader pack that utilizes advanced Iris capabilities and additional graphics driver features to deliver beautiful visuals with excellent performance on modern hardware.

Currently, the shaders are tested only on up-to-date AMD+Mesa and NVIDIA drivers under Linux. If you find a bug or want to suggest improvements - it's best to create an issue in the GitHub repository or leave a comment on the project page.

Features and Functionality

LabPBR 1.3 Compatibility - the shaders support various PBR rendering elements:

• Albedo and normals - from resource packs
• Smoothness - configurable as linear or perceptual roughness
• Reflections and emissiveness - set as constants or procedurally generated

Main capabilities:

• Smooth colored real-time shadows with volumetric lighting through distorted shadow mapping
• Physically accurate reflections with colored block lighting based on light lists and standard Minecraft lighting
• Wide range of optimized post-processing effects including FidelityFX contrast adaptive sharpening, SMAA 1x anti-aliasing, auto-exposure, and various tone mapping operators
• Customizable waves and water opacity
• Built-in utilities: light level visualization and compass overlay

Compatibility with Mods and Resource Packs

Most PBR information (light colors, material normals, roughness) is procedurally generated, so it should work excellently with most resource packs and mods.

Mods that modify the Iris shader pipeline (such as Chunks Fade In) are supported experimentally and may cause compilation issues.

Distant Horizons is compatible in terms of loading, but geometry beyond the standard render distance won't be visible. Full support is planned for future updates.

System Requirements

• Iris 1.9.2+ with support for features:
  • BLOCK_EMISSION_ATTRIBUTE
  • COMPUTE_SHADERS
  • CUSTOM_IMAGES
  • ENTITY_TRANSLUCENT
  • SEPARATE_HARDWARE_SAMPLERS
  • SSBO
• Graphics drivers with support for GLSL 4.60.8+

Most modern devices (except macOS) likely support everything needed, but you may need to update Iris and graphics card drivers.

Performance Tuning in Compatibility Menu

Default settings are optimized for all systems meeting the requirements, but you can improve performance or quality by adjusting individual parameters. Some values may cause shader compilation issues - in such cases, simply reset the parameter. Problematic options are usually marked with a red ⚠ icon.

Implementation-Limited Options

Light List Capacity is limited by the GPU's local memory capacity. On some graphics cards you can set values higher than the standard maximum, but this only makes sense if the current limit is insufficient (manifested as light flickering).

16/8-Bit Data Types use optimized formats to reduce register and memory usage. Performance depends on hardware and drivers.

Ternary Min/Max - uses special AMD functions that may speed up calculations. Recommended to enable when possible.

32×16-Bit Multiplication - specialized functions for accelerating multiplication operations.

About Development and Modification

RenderPearl's source code is designed for modification and reuse. The code is written according to best practices with priority on performance over readability. Technical documentation is available in the project's GitHub repository.