Photon Shader

Community

• Join my discord server for questions, suggestions and news regarding this shader pack

Features

• Fully revamped sky, lighting and water with a cohesive visual style
• Immersive weather system with different skies each day, featuring multiple volumetric cloud layers
• Colored lighting using a voxel flood-fill algorithm (enabled with Ultra profile, requires Iris)
• Full labPBR resource pack support
• Extensive settings menu allowing you to customize every aspect of the shader
• Screen-space reflections
• Volumetric lighting
• Soft shadows with variable penumbra size
• High quality ambient occlusion (GTAO)
• Camera effects: bloom, depth of field, motion blur
• Much improved image quality with TAA, FXAA and CAS
• Advanced temporal upscaling (disabled by default) for low end devices

Compatibility

• Photon can be used with Iris (recommended) or OptiFine on Nvidia, AMD and Intel GPUs
• Iris is a modern shader loader with far better performance, mod compatibility and developer features than OptiFine. Some features (Colored Lighting) will only work on Iris
• Photon is also compatible with Distant Horizons (as of writing this requires a special version of Iris and Distant Horizons which is available in the Iris installer)

Showcase videos

Acknowledgments

• Emin - Shadow bias method from Complementary Reimagined (fully fixes peter panning and light leaking underground!)
• DrDesten - Depth tolerance calculation for SSR (helps to prevent false reflections)
• Jessie - f0 and f82 values for labPBR hardcoded metals
• Sledgehammer Games - Bloom downsampling method used in Call of Duty Advanced Warfare (described here)
• http://momentsingraphics.de/ - Blue noise texture