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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.

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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

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+1
in 7 days
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in 15 days
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in 1 month
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Net star changes over overlapping periods, not daily totals. Missing measurements are left blank. Stars measure attention, not software quality.

README.md

Original



Photon Shaders

A gameplay-focused shader pack for Minecraft

Screenshot

Acknowledgments

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/shaderpacks folder

Downloads

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

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Community

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