What is Iris Shaders?
Iris by coderbot is the shader loader that freed shader packs from OptiFine. It implements the OptiFine shader pack format on top of Sodium's rendering engine, so packs like BSL, Complementary, and Photon run with dramatically better performance than they ever did on OptiFine.
Iris ships for Fabric and NeoForge, bundles with Sodium in most distributions, and its in-game shader menu makes pack switching instant.
Installing and Using Shader Packs
- Install Iris plus Sodium (the standalone Iris installer bundles both) for your Minecraft version.
- Download shader packs — Complementary Reimagined and BSL are the standard first picks; Modrinth hosts hundreds.
- Drop the pack zip into the
shaderpacksfolder, reachable from the in-game shader screen's "Open Shader Pack Folder" button. - Open Options → Video Settings → Shader Packs, select the pack, and apply it. The K key toggles shaders entirely by default.
- Tune per-pack settings in the same screen — shadow distance and quality presets move framerates the most.
Compatibility notes: most OptiFine-format packs run, with popular packs explicitly supported. Iris updates track new Minecraft versions quickly, and its shader features have grown past OptiFine parity into its own extended format.
Iris Shaders FAQ
Which shader packs work with Iris?
The large majority of OptiFine-format packs: Complementary, BSL, Photon, Solas, Rethinking Voxels, and hundreds more. Pack pages on Modrinth list Iris compatibility explicitly.
Iris or OptiFine for shaders?
Iris renders the same packs faster and coexists with modern mod ecosystems. OptiFine remains an all-in-one for older versions; on 1.16+ the Iris plus Sodium pairing is the standard recommendation.
Why are my shaders slow?
Shadow quality and render distance dominate cost. Lower the pack's shadow distance first, then internal resolution; heavy packs like SEUS PTGI want strong GPUs at any setting.