VulkanMod-Next

VulkanMod Next

Minecraft draws its world with Vulkan instead of OpenGL.

More frames at high render distances, a menu of effects you assemble yourself, and the performance settings the game never had. Without Vulkan, it renders exactly as it always did and tells you why.

1.12.2 is the build that works and the one to install — still being worked on, not a final version. A 1.16.5 build has been started and is early: it draws the world and none of the effects yet. It is not published here; it lives in the repository.

Updating from 0.10.0 or earlier keeps your settings — the first launch carries your old configuration file over by itself.

In short

• More frames, especially at high render distances.
• Effects with a slider each — waves, reflections, refraction, bloom, ambient occlusion, swaying grass, ray-traced shadows. Every one off by default.
• Dynamic lights — a torch in hand, one dropped, a mob on fire.
• Settings the game never had: entity draw distance, animated-texture control, a background cap, render distance to 64, hold-to-zoom.
• Steps aside if anything goes wrong — no Vulkan, an old driver, mismatched cards.

You need MixinBooter in your mods folder. No launcher installs it for you.

What you actually see

Blocks and creatures are drawn by Vulkan; the rest stays with the game, sharing one depth buffer so everything lines up.

Options → Video Settings → VulkanMod Next Settings…, or F6 — each setting shows its processor/GPU/VRAM cost. Presets: Stable, Beautiful, Balanced, Performance, Potato.

Effects

• Water — waves, fresnel, bank reflections, refraction.
• Ray-traced shadows — sun, hand torch, fire, wall torches; the one effect that costs frames.
• Bloom — light off lava, torches, glowstone, modded light blocks.
• Ambient occlusion — shadow in corners and under overhangs.
• Swaying grass and flowers.
• Grass lit like a bush, not two flat boards.
• A round sun and moon, size and warmth on sliders.
• Frame averaging — smooths traced-shadow grain.
• The whole picture graded — contrast, warmth, the shader-pack look.
• Sun and moon glinting off water.
• Ice, caustics, wet rain, warm fog, tinted clouds.
• Your own time of day and weather, client-side.

Speed

• Entity and block-entity draw distance — biggest win in mob farms and busy servers.
• Animated textures stop updating off-screen.
• Background framerate cap for a minimised game.
• Render distance up to 64 chunks.
• Offscreen chunk preloading.
• One copy of the world instead of two — frees around a gigabyte of video memory.
• Cleaner distant snow.
• A budget for explosion particles — a large blast keeps one in eight.
• Hold-to-zoom on C, rebindable.

Honest limits

This is not a drop-in OptiFine replacement, and it is not finished.

• Not every effect reaches everything. The ones that run over the finished picture — occlusion, contact and cloud shadows, god rays, grading — reach creatures, particles and other mods' content for free. The rest are computed while the blocks are drawn and stop there. A burning creeper still doesn't glow: what glows is recorded per block while a chunk is built, and a creeper is not a block.
• Creatures are drawn by Vulkan by default, which is what gives them a shadow of their own shape instead of vanilla's round blur, and puts them into the depth the water reflects against. A mod that builds its creatures with its own drawing code rather than out of the game's model parts is left to the game, as are chests, signs and machines.
• Screen reflections reflect what is on the screen — that's the whole of what the technique can do, anywhere it's used. Nothing off the edge of the frame, nothing hidden behind something nearer. Treat this one as unfinished.
• Chunk building dominates the frame while you move at high render distances. Standing still is much faster than turning, and that's the game's own work rather than this mod's.
• OptiFine and shader mods replace the same parts of the game this mod does. With one installed, the Vulkan renderer simply doesn't load, and you get that renderer plus this mod's settings and speed options. They can't share the world.
• No connected textures, and no shader pack support.

Requirements

• Minecraft 1.12.2 with Forge, or Cleanroom — both are tested
• MixinBooter 10.7 or newer — a required dependency, and no launcher installs it
• A 64-bit Vulkan driver on Windows or Linux. Almost any driver from the last several years will do; without one the mod loads, says so in chat, and leaves the world to OpenGL
• On a machine with two graphics cards, both halves have to land on the same one — the mod checks at startup and stays on vanilla rendering if they disagree

Where it is known to run

✅ deliberately tested — AMD and NVIDIA use different depth-handoff paths. ⚠️ untried, no known issue. ❌ macOS has no Vulkan driver.

Other optimisation mods

🟢 runs alongside · 🟡 Vulkan renderer stands aside silently, rest of the mod stays · 🔴 cannot install together. Confirmed at that scale on All the Mods 3 Remix — frame cost matched a bare instance.

Questions

Will this give me more frames? Usually yes, most at high render distances — effects are separate, and each says its cost before you turn it on.

Will it work with my modpack, and with OptiFine? Everything has a fallback. With OptiFine or a shader mod, the Vulkan renderer stands aside but this mod's menu and speed options still work — both can be installed, just not both drawing.

Will there be a version for a newer Minecraft? 1.14.4 and 1.16.5 are wanted, not soon, no date — 1.12.2 comes first.

MixinBooter fails inside itself on an older pack? Some older library mods bundle their own copy of Mixin, Forge hands the package to whichever jar sorts first by file name, and MixinBooter loses. Renaming its jar aaa_mixinbooter-….jar settles it. True of any pack that age, with or without this mod.

Something wrong, or nothing happened? Missing MixinBooter is the usual cause of nothing happening. For a bad picture or a crash, send logs/latest.log after about a minute of play.

About this mod

Written with AI assistance under a person's direction — every decision, every measurement and every release is a person's. Source public under the LGPL.

Named after VulkanMod, a Fabric mod for 1.17+ that replaces the renderer outright — this one is not a port of it. Written for Forge 1.12.2, leaves the game holding its window, and shares no code with the original; only the idea, checked against its public fixes.

Licence

GNU LGPL v3.