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sixthsurge/photon
sixthsurge/photon has 1,951 GitHub stars and 353 forks. GitHot measured +1 stars in 24 hours. Last checked 2026-11-08 23:32 UTC. Last push 2026-11-01.
A gameplay-focused shader pack for Minecraft
What you can do
- Fully revamped sky, lighting and water
- Detailed clouds with many layers and cloud types
- Immersive weather system providing different skies each day
- Voxel-based colored lighting (enabled with Ultra profile, requires Iris)
Measured star growth
- in 24h
- +1
- in 7 days
- Update delayed
- in 15 days
- Update delayed
- in 1 month
- Update delayed
Net star changes over overlapping periods, not daily totals. Missing measurements are left blank. Stars measure attention, not software quality.
README.md
OriginalPhoton Shaders
A gameplay-focused shader pack for Minecraft

Acknowledgments
- Menu translations:
- NakiriRuri and OrzMiku - Chinese Simplified (China; Mandarin)
- ChunghwaMC - Chinese Traditional (Taiwan; Mandarin)
- Jmayk - Italian
- Timtaran - Russian
- shihyeon - Korean
- DVRKHz - Spanish
- Patatagod69 - Dutch
- sincerity - Estonian
- Theuska - Brazilian Portuguese
- 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)
- Essentuan - Photonics mod support
- Jessie - f0 and f82 values for labPBR hardcoded metals
- Sledgehammer Games - Bloom downsampling method used in Call of Duty Advanced Warfare (described here)
- http://momentsingrapics.de/ - Blue noise texture
- NASA Scientific Visualization Studio - Galaxy image
Installation
- Photon can be used with Iris (recommended) or OptiFine
- 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
- Once you have your preferred shader loader installed, simply place the downloaded zip file in your
.minecraft/shaderpacksfolder
Downloads
- Releases (recommended)
- Lastest commit
Features
- Fully revamped sky, lighting and water
- Detailed clouds with many layers and cloud types
- Immersive weather system providing different skies each day
- Voxel-based colored lighting (enabled with Ultra profile, requires Iris)
- Screen-space reflections
- Volumetric fog
- Soft shadows with variable-size penumbras
- Detailed 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
- Extensive settings menu allowing you to customize every aspect of the shader
- Full labPBR resource pack support
Compatibility
GPU vendors
- Nvidia
- AMD
- Intel
- NOT Apple Metal
- You may be able to get the shader pack to work by disabling some settings: try SH Skylight and Colored Shadows.
Shader loaders
- Iris - version 1.5 and above
- OptiFine - on Minecraft 1.16.5 and above
Special mod support
Showcase videos
Community
- For questions, suggestions and news regarding this shader pack, head to my discord server
- You can also give me money if you want to
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