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Minecraft shaders are a fantastic way to improve the game's visuals by introducing various lighting, color, and post-processing effects. However, shaders do come with a performance impact, especially graphically intense shaders, which can really bog down a player's CPU/GPU processing power. Fortunately, there are more than a few shaders that can run well without much performance loss.
If players are struggling with performance issues when installing Minecraft shaders, they may not be looking for the right ones. With that in mind, here are some of the best performance-friendly shaders available after the 1.21/Tricky Trials update.
NOTE: This article is subjective and reflects the writer's opinion.
Five of the best performance shaders for Minecraft 1.21
1) MakeUp - Ultra Fast
When these Minecraft shaders claim to be Ultra Fast, they mean it. MakeUp's Ultra Fast shaders introduce several visual effects including dynamic shadows, volumetric clouds, depth of field, anti-aliasing, motion blur, and water reflection/refraction, all without hampering a player's device performance-wise. Moreover, the various features of this shader pack can be enabled/disabled as needed.
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Even better, this set of shaders provides the ability to alter the game's color scheme without directly changing the in-game textures.
2) Miniature Shader
This set of Minecraft shaders doesn't have some of the heavy-duty post-processing effects that many of its counterparts do, but that's a positive for players on lower-end hardware. It improves emissive lighting, adds blocky shadows, and adds reflections to some surfaces like water and ice without saddling players' CPUs/GPUs with too many effects to render.
All in all, Miniature Shader won't create drop-dead gorgeous visuals, but it will improve them and keep the game's core aesthetic intact.
3) Mellow
Complete with lightmapped shadows, ambient and border fog, bloom, realistic clouds, custom water with reflections, and adjustable light colorations, Mellow is simultaneously graphically pleasing and lightweight among Minecraft shaders. Mellow aims to be rich in color palette while being built from the bottom up for lower-end hardware.
Even as a low-end shader, the visuals that can be created by Mellow are very impressive, and can certainly live up to their name by producing a calming effect.
4) Bloop Shaders
For a variable shader that can suit a wide variety of hardware configurations, Bloop Shaders may be worth using in Minecraft. This shader set comes with multiple performance profiles that are pre-adjusted for high-end and low-end hardware. Moreover, players can fine-tune their settings to suit their graphical and performance preferences.
Bloop Shaders have been tested on integrated graphics setups just as they have on high-end graphics cards, and have proven to inflict very little performance change at all. So players should have very few issues with these shaders once they've found the right settings for them.
5) RenderPearl
Offering customizable lighting and shadow effects, RenderPearl introduces pleasing graphical improvements while ensuring that they don't inflict a sizable performance impact. This is achieved by automatically disabling the rendering of certain effects when they aren't relevant, ensuring players have enough resources on their platform to continue running the game smoothly.
The visuals are pretty realistic all things considered. Since this shader pack has only been tested on the Windows OS with Nvidia graphics cards, there may be unexpected glitches or issues when used with certain configurations. Still, this set of shaders does a great job at delivering great on-screen visuals while keeping the game running well by omitting the rendering of visuals the player won't see.
