Vitrail Shaders
Shader packs have been written for OpenGL for over a decade. Minecraft now ships a native Vulkan renderer alongside the old one, and none of those packs were built for it. Vitrail Shaders exists to close that gap: it reads an OptiFine-format pack straight out of your shaderpacks folder, translates its GLSL once at load time, and hands the result to the compiler the game already embeds. Nothing gets translated while a frame is being drawn, which is exactly why it can work at all.
What Vitrail Shaders Actually Does
The project started with a simple question: could packs written for OpenGL over more than a decade run untouched on the renderer that now ships with the game? The answer, so far, is a qualified yes. The world goes through your pack — terrain, water, shadows, sky, clouds, weather, particles, mobs, block entities, the held hand, name plates and signs. What still comes from the game itself is named in the engine log the first time a given place draws, and that list shrinks with each release.
It is worth being upfront: this is a beta. The Vulkan backend is marked experimental by the game itself, and the setting you have to enable literally reads "Prefer Vulkan (Experimental)". Some packs still render incorrectly in places, and a wrong picture is worse than a missing one. If you need a finished, polished image today, Iris on the OpenGL backend remains the reference this engine is checked against, frame by frame.
Supported Versions and Loaders
Vitrail Shaders targets the Minecraft 26.2 release line where the native Vulkan renderer is available. It is client only, and it ships as a single jar that works on both Fabric and NeoForge. One important caveat: on NeoForge, the current release still crashes on the Vulkan renderer due to its own texture unwrapper, so you will need to install that build by hand. Do not run another shader engine alongside it.
Which Packs Work Today
Vitrail is the engine, not the pack. It cannot ship any packs, because they belong to their authors and their licences do not permit redistribution. These are the ones the developer runs against daily:
- Complementary Unbound, Reimagined, and Euphoria Patches
- BSL
- Bliss
- Photon
- Mellow
- Body Camera
- Sildur's Vibrant (draws except for its water)
- Reverie (loads and draws, with defects still being worked through)
A pack missing from that list is simply one that has not been loaded yet, not one that is unsupported. The project keeps a table of packs actually tried, starting from what you see on screen and naming the cause of any problem.
If you would rather skip the manual file juggling, the foxygame.net launcher offers a one-click install path that pulls Vitrail Shaders and its dependencies into the right folder automatically, then keeps it updated as new builds land.
How to Install Vitrail Shaders for Minecraft
Installation is straightforward once you accept the beta caveats. Here is the process:
- Place the Vitrail jar in your mods folder (Fabric or NeoForge, client only).
- Launch the game once, then switch the renderer to Vulkan in Video Settings under "Prefer Vulkan (Experimental)".
- Restart the game — the backend is chosen at boot, so the change only takes effect on the next launch.
- Drop your chosen OptiFine-format pack into shaderpacks/ and select it in-game.
If the frame rate comes up short, look for the Render Scale slider on Vitrail's own Video Settings page. It draws the world at 25 to 100 percent of the window resolution and scales back up before the interface, so menus, chat and the F3 screen stay sharp no matter what you pick.
Compatibility Notes
Distant Horizons is compatible, and your pack's own DH programs handle its far terrain. Chloride is not required, but if you run it, five settings decide what reaches your pack: Fast Chests and Fast Beds on the Performance page, plus Max Entity Distance, Max Monster Distance and Max Block Entity Distance on the Entities page. Vitrail names any it detects in the log at startup.
When you download Vitrail Shaders, remember it is LGPL-3.0-only. Parts of the pack loader and value catalogue are adapted from Iris, also LGPL-3.0, and the expression grammar comes from Kroppeb's stareval. What was taken and what changed is recorded file by file in the project's NOTICE. Source, changelogs and full compatibility notes live at Vitrail-Shaders, and it is also listed on Modrinth.
The Bottom Line
Vitrail Shaders is an early, honest attempt to make a decade of shader work run on a renderer it was never written for, without asking pack authors to change a single line. It is not finished, and it does not pretend to be. But if you are curious about Vulkan, willing to tolerate some rough edges, and want to see your favourite pack render through the new backend, it is a genuinely interesting project to follow — and the compatibility list keeps growing.