FastPBR Shaders 1.21 / 1.20

The FastPBR shader pack derives its name from a special graphics technique that aims to achieve photorealism, bringing it into Minecraft to amplify both the game’s appearance and player experience. One of the universal downsides, regardless of the type of shaders, is a significant drop in performance. The developer of FastPBR, RRe36, placed a major focus on optimizing the features and the techniques used in order to retain as much FPS as possible and avoid performance drops. This caused its popularity to skyrocket immediately after release, alongside some quite impressive visual effects. FastPBR draws on its realism from physically based rendering, a collection of techniques that attempt to mimic light realistically, making it look more true-to-life than other algorithms. The true beauty of this approach is most noticeable during the Minecraft sunsets through shadow display, as well as in the water reflections. There’s a major difference in the amount of light coming through depending on whether you’re walking through the forest biome or the plains biome. You’ll be stunned by the breathtaking scenes as soon as you load up these shaders. Although it puts the spotlight on performance, FastPBR doesn’t lack in features. One of these are dynamic soft shadows. They are responsible for the smooth transitions between a shadowed and a light area, with seamless edges that add to the game’s immersion. With this technique, shadows load in real time as the player moves into new areas. This means that loading new chunks won’t cause additional FPS drops, since the previously loaded areas are removed from memory. With the combination of ray tracing, these shaders will have as little of an impact on the game performance as possible. Adding to the previous feature is a rendering process known as TAAU. Whereas you’d commonly encounter jagged edges in Minecraft textures that have an irregular shape (such as trees), with this pack you won’t have to worry about that nuisance. The process combines multiple frames and filters them to improve image quality.

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With the upscaling mechanism, FastPBR renders shadows in a lower resolution but scales them up for both upgraded performance and appearance. This provides atmospheric improvements, prettier sunlight rays, better lighting effects, and so on. Lighting and shadows aren’t the only things that FastPBR promotes – volumetric clouds also enhance the appearance of a cloudy sky. Instead of just looking like a white patch of paint pasted on a blue dome, this technique gives them a 3D representation with depth and volume. They’re able to move dynamically through the sky, cast shadows, and even disperse sun rays as they would in the real world. With the addition of a realistic skybox, you can forget about the regular Minecraft pixelated rain. Instead, these weather changes are completely going to transform the sky and the overall atmosphere. All of the aforementioned techniques would cause a significant dropoff in game performance if not for HBIL. This approach precomputes some of the needed calculations for shadows and lighting and stores them in a buffer. When they’re needed, they can be used instantly without wasting processing power. Some screen-space methods are also used for post-processing optimizations on a final rendered image. With a smart combination of these performance-enhancing techniques, Minecraft retains its relatively low hardware requirements. As far as prerequisites go, FastPBR shaders requires Iris 6.0 or newer in order to run properly. While this has its upsides – mainly due to the innovative features that Iris offers – it can also deter a lot of players since the developer explicitly said that this shader pack doesn’t support Optifine due to its lack of an extensive featureset. Also, there has a been misconception due to its name which caused many to believe that the shaders support specular data-based reflections, which they don’t. However, FastPBR works with normal maps, which are used to define how each particular pixel and material will reflect or absorb light. While FastPBR does provide better performance compared to most of the other shaders on the market, it still requires a graphics card that supports at least OpenGL 4.3. However, when looking at all of the features it provides in combination with stunning performance, it truly is one of the best shader packs on the market right now.