RenderPearl

New Features

• Direct sunlight can now be disabled in The Overworld by changing the Shadow Distance option to Off.

Improvements

• Light list creation now uses frustum culling to avoid collecting lights that are too far outside the player's view, improving performance in most cases and reducing the risk of the list list becoming full.
• Light list creation and de-duplication + sorting now happen during separate frames and require one less memory barrier, for hopefully higher and more stable performance.
• f0/reflectance is now handled more realistically in BRDF reflections on water and some metal blocks. Preparations have also been made for using f0 information from LabPBR textures.
• Some workarounds for incorrect ordering between translucent geometry rendering and the deferred lighting pass have been disabled in Minecraft 26.1+, where they are no longer required, improving performance.

Other Changes

• Intensity of different light sources is now more physically based. Automatic exposure has been modified to work better with these new values, but some things may still look strange. Please report any significant issues.
• Direct sunlight has been disabled in The End.

Fixed Issues

• Voxy render distance is handled as 1/16 its actual size.
• Opaque Voxy geometry is rendered incorrectly (reported in the shaderLABS Discord server by anas_6230).
• (Iris 1.10.7 bug worked around) Opaque block entities are rendered incorrectly.

Possibly Fixed Issues

• The block breaking overlay is rendered incorrectly (#24, #30, comment in #27).
• (Driver bug worked around) The shader pack fails to compile on some AMD graphics drivers for Windows (#17, #31, reported in the shaderLABS Discord server by mine18, and on CurseForge by Jaxxy_).

GitHub Release

New Features

• Experimental compatibility with Minecraft 1.21-1.21.9 has been implemented. RenderPearl is still most stable on the latest supported Minecraft version, and may have bugs or missing features in older versions. Please report any issues that occur.
• Experimental Distant Horizons and Voxy integration is now available (works towards #11). This is very basic and only tested with the latest releases. Distant Horizons support is more complete than support for Voxy, which currently has major visual issues.
• RenderPearl now includes a description for the Iris/Oculus Shader Folder mod.

Fixed Issues

• An optimization using subgroup operations is unnecessarily disabled when forward rendered light list lighting is unsupported.

GitHub Release

New Features

• Alpha tint and chunk fade are now applied to translucent geometry.
• The fragment shader for translucent lit geometry has been completely rewritten, and now implements ray traced hand light. Per-pixel light list-based block light is also available with graphics drivers that support subgroup operations and subgroupBroadcast with a non-constant index (most common drivers except AMD's for Windows).
  • The vertex shader implementation of light list-based block light has been removed.
• The option to apply a directional multiplier to ambient occlusion has now been added and is enabled by default (works towards #8).
• A sun path rotation of zero is now allowed (works towards #12).
• The sizes of celestial bodies can now be configured (works towards #12).
• End flashes now affect lighting in the end.
• Shadow distortion is now configurable and tuned better in the different profiles.

Improvements

• Opaque and translucent lit geometry now share the same rewritten vertex shader and vertex data format for much reduced code duplication.
• Light list colors are now manually packed using atomics when 16-bit integers are disabled, halving memory usage.
• A slightly faster version of the GGX specular D term is now used when 16-bit floats are disabled.
• Lighting-related functions are now shared between shaders for forward and deferred rendering, reducing code duplication.
• Emissiveness is now handled slightly better. LabPBR support is still not implemented but planned for a future release.
• The shadow bias has been improved, reducing various artifacts such as light leaks.

Other Changes

• The maximum effect of the Ambient Occlusion option has been increased.
• The falloff of light list-based block light has been slightly modified.

Fixed Issues

• Extensions may be enabled after actual code.
• Translucent geometry is lit incorrectly when rendered before the deferred lighting pass (Closes #15, Closes #18, Closes #19).
  • This was caused by some changes in vanilla Minecraft breaking an Iris feature that RenderPearl relied on.
• Blending and render targets are sometimes configured incorrectly.

GitHub Release

Fixed Issues

• The shader pack fails to compile in The Nether and The End (#16).

GitHub Release

Improvements

• A driver bug workaround for the work group size of the global light list de-duplication pass has been disabled on all non-Intel graphics drivers. This could improve performance slightly in some situations.

Fixed Issues

• The shader pack fails to compile on AMD graphics drivers on Windows (reported by quakingdoom).

GitHub Release