Aetherium - Vulkan Shader

Shader packs

• Standard-format shader packs run natively on Minecraft's Vulkan renderer: gbuffer, shadow, full-screen, compute and geometry programs, custom images and buffers, raw textures and LabPBR material maps.
• Terrain draws through Sodium's chunk renderer with the vertex data packs read, and honours pack render layers, separate ambient occlusion, old lighting and light-block geometry. Switching packs rebuilds the terrain without a restart.
• Distant Horizons support: far terrain is drawn through the pack's dh_* programs, with far-terrain shadows.
• Packs load in the background, with a small progress panel in the HUD corner, and a disk cache for converted shaders makes loading the same pack again about 44% faster.
• Render scale (50–100%) with FSR 1.0 upscaling and adjustable sharpening.
• Shadow distance and shadow map scale overrides.

Shader pack screen

• Pack header with name, version and option counts, a sections sidebar, profile chips, search and a "changed only" filter.
• Options with inline Reset buttons, arrows that step either way, and details showing the current and default values.
• Apply, Discard and Done, with what is waiting to be applied shown under the sections.
• Live preview (hold Tab), import and export of pack settings, drag-and-drop install and keyboard navigation.

Performance

• About twenty shader engine optimisations, each with its own switch, among them the shadow cache, hardware shadow filtering, targeted snapshots, settled bindings, load-op clears and the transform cache. Measured on Complementary Unbound: frame rate +4%, CPU frame time −10.5% against everything off.
• Memory: shared block shapes, shared empty item data and lightweight chunk data checks.

HUD and quality of life

• Hold-to-zoom (Z) with scroll, adjustable least, most and starting zoom, zoomed mouse sensitivity and an optional cinematic camera.
• Zoom readout: block coordinates, distance and facing direction, plus a 3D preview and the name of the block or mob under the crosshair. It can sit in any corner, and either panel can be turned off.
• Pixel-exact centred crosshair.
• Aetherium settings screen with search, tags and presets, reachable from Options › Aetherium... next to Shader Packs....
• A prompt to switch the game to Vulkan when it starts on OpenGL.