⚠️ Requirements

• Vulkanite mod(modified version) (26.2 branch). DO NOT use the original version
• LabPBR resource pack (required for correct material decoding)
• RT-capable GPU. For example, RTX 4060
• After reloading resource packs, restart the game to make the shader work properly.

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What's New

Almost everything has been rewritten since v0.3.0. Here's what you'll notice:

Better Image Quality

• Much less noise — the new denoiser preserves sharp edges (block corners, stairs, fences) while aggressively smoothing flat surfaces like walls and floors. Rough surfaces like stone and gravel receive naturally stronger filtering than smooth surfaces like polished diorite.
• Less ghosting — camera movement no longer leaves trails behind. The new temporal clamping catches and discards stale history instead of blending it in.
• Clearer reflections — reflections on curved surfaces (cauldrons, anvils, water ripples) no longer smear when you move. Specular noise cleans up faster frame-to-frame.
• Better water & glass — transparent surfaces correctly trace through multiple layers. Looking through a glass pane into underwater caves now works properly.
• No more crawling noise patterns — the RNG no longer correlates across frames, so noise is truly random frame-to-frame instead of forming visible grid-like patterns.

Path Guiding

Light now intelligently samples toward bright directions learned from previous frames. Dark corners converge faster because the shader stops wasting rays on directions that lead to shadow.

End Sky

The End dimension now has a proper custom sky: a procedural nebula with glowing rune-ring structures. Toggle between this and atmospheric scattering in the shader settings.

Filmic Bloom

Bloom is now smoother and faster by using Gaussian downsample & upsample

New Tone Mapper

Replaced the old ACES tone mapper with TonyMcMapface — a tiny neural network trained for natural-looking HDR-to-SDR conversion. Colors are more balanced, with less color shifting in bright highlights.

Auto Exposure

The shader now automatically adjusts exposure based on scene brightness. Walk from a dark cave into sunlight and your eyes will adapt naturally. Tune the paper-white luminance and exposure curve to your liking in settings.

Performance

• Higher FPS across the board thanks to buffer unification, half-float packing, and compute shader optimizations
• Lower VRAM usage — all per-pixel data has been consolidated into 4 packed buffers
• Parallax occlusion mapping only on first hit — secondary bounces skip POM, saving significant RT cost

Full Iris UI

All settings are now exposed through the Iris shader options panel — no config file editing needed. 39 sliders and toggles across 6 categories: Ray Tracing, Material, Exposure & Display, Bloom, Temporal Filter, and À-Trous Denoiser. Plus 22 debug views for screenshots and troubleshooting.

Chinese Localization

Complete zh_cn translation of all UI text.

Known issue

Refraction is still noisy

Feat: Groundbreaking denoiser — SG-based physical irradiance integration + SVGF with Mahalanobis edge-stopping

This is a landmark release that rewrites the entire denoising pipeline from the ground up. The new denoiser produces dramatically cleaner, more stable, and more physically accurate results than ALL previous versions combined.

CORE INNOVATION: Spherical Gaussian (SG) Physical Irradiance Integration

The old SH (Spherical Harmonics) irradiance projection has been completely replaced with a physically-based SG (Spherical Gaussian) integration framework:

• Dual-SG product convolution — light lobe × cosine lobe solved analytically via SGProduct(), yielding exact attenuation without series truncation • HSG (Hemispherical Spherical Gaussian) integral — closed-form integration over the hemisphere using a rational approximation of the erf function • NaN-safe math primitives throughout — precise_erf() with Abramowitz-Stegun coefficients, expm1_over_x() with 1st-order Taylor fallback, and safe_lambda_over_one_minus_exp_two_lambda() with cubic Taylor expansion near the singular point λ → 0 • Numerically stable dual-SG product — sqrt_term clamped against negative floating-point drift, axis normalization with ε-guard, log-space amplitude accumulation to avoid overflow

This means every irradiance sample is now projected and reconstructed with physically correct cosine-weighted integration, eliminating the ringing, energy loss, and directional smearing that plagued the old SH pipeline.

TEMPORAL ACCUMULATION: Unbiased Welford Variance Estimation

Previous versions used a biased exponential moving variance. The new pipeline employs Welford's online algorithm — a numerically stable, UNBIASED estimator that tracks both mean and variance in a single pass:

• True population variance (not EMA approximation) → spatial filter gets accurate uncertainty estimates • Per-pixel temporal weight based on geometric consistency (normal × depth × position reprojection validation) • Exponential moving average blending with adaptive history length — faster convergence on new surfaces, longer accumulation on static ones

SPATIAL FILTER: SVGF with Mahalanobis-Distance Edge-Stopping

The à-trous wavelet filter has been completely rewritten with a multi- dimensional edge-stopping function that jointly considers:

• Normal similarity: pow(dot(n1, n2), NORMAL_POWER) — cosine-weighted • Depth discontinuity: anisotropic kernel stretching along surfaces at grazing angles, staying tight across depth edges • Luminance-directional statistical distance: full Mahalanobis distance combining SH-derived intrinsic variance (|dir|² vs Y²) with temporal Monte Carlo variance → variance-guided adaptive stopping

6-level à-trous hierarchy: step 1→2→4→8→16→32 pixels, each with R0 tuned to the spatial scale. High-variance regions get aggressive filtering; well-converged regions preserve fine detail. This is a night-and-day difference from the old uniform blur.

ADDITIONAL IMPROVEMENTS

• Neural network tone mapper (20 hidden neurons, 4→20→3 architecture with sigmoid activations) — trained to approximate a high-quality photographic tone curve, replacing the old hard-coded filmic curve • Full HDR pipeline (hdr.glsl) — proper HDR→SDR conversion with luminance adaptation • Physically-based atmosphere scattering rewrite — Rayleigh/Mie with per- dimension parameters (Overworld/Nether/End), sunlight brightness boosted 10× to match real-world solar irradiance ratios • Importance sampling via Gaussian sphere function — faster convergence with fewer fireflies • Parallax Occlusion Mapping — geometric detail on flat surfaces • GGX denominator epsilon guards — prevents NaN/Inf propagation in specular BRDF evaluation • Fixed a serious TAA reprojection bug, reduced VRAM usage • Comprehensive technical documentation (main.pdf / main_en.pdf) covering the full pipeline with mathematical derivations

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RESULT: This is not an incremental improvement. The denoising quality jump is categorical — clean indirect illumination that converges faster, preserves geometric detail, and eliminates the noise bias that plagued every prior version. The renderer is now fundamentally physically-grounded rather than heuristic.

Fixed TAA bugs

Use more efficient algorithm (in doc/main_en.pdf) to create a better denoiser. Now the scene is more realistic!

Make atmosphere rendering more faster

Less noisy image

better shadow

improved image quality

fixed many bugs

fixed some bugs

cleaner image

Fixed a SEIROUS BUG on NVIDIA driver version 551.23

Added more settings and improved some qualities

Add clouds (ugly)

fixed some bugs and improved image detail

improved quality and fixed bugs