The new Updates changed visual design drastically and added a ton of effects, screenshots and description are partly severly outdated as of now, I am too lazy to update this at the moment.
About
Aetherstone is a stylized Cartoonish shader, built around having beautiful visuals while staying comfortably playable even on integrated graphics. The shader is still under active development.
Aetherstone is not trying to be photorealistic. Its stylized lighting, an (optional) ink outline and cool-tinted shadows give it a painted feel closer to modern stylized RPG games, while offering effects like dynamic shadows, 3D looking water, Physically Based Rendering...
PROFILES
Five profiles, Potato up to Max:
• Potato: The bare essentials only, for the lowest-end hardware.
• Balanced: Most effects on but some left off without ruining visuals, sample counts trimmed.
• Recommended (default): The intended high-FPS experience.
• Pretty: Higher fidelity when FPS headroom exists.
• Max: Every effect at full quality (not much difference to Pretty).
Performance
Start on Recommended and move up or down the list from there. A good way to find the performance and visuals that are good for you, is also to not only change shader settings but also play around with real render distance and Distant Horizons' render distance if you are using DH. On weak hardware I recommend 6-12 real render distance with Distant Horizons turned off, or Distant Horizons 32 render distance and chunk quality on low/medium paired with 4-6 real render distance.
Actual FPS depends heavily on your hardware, resource pack, render distance (including Distant Horizon's) and scene complexity, so no fixed benchmark number would be honest here.
Window Resizing / Resolution Bug Workaround
Changing your window size, toggling fullscreen, or altering screen resolution while the shader is active can cause visual glitching.
Workaround: Simply reload the shader pack. You can do this by opening shader settings and toggling the pack off and back on, or by assigning a hotkey, under:
Options → Controls → Key Binds → scroll down to Iris → ReloadShaders.
Mod support
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Distant Horizons terrain and water render through the shader at LOD range, including the underwater ceiling past the normal render edge. DH's own shadow casting is intentionally not used; the shadow map stays independent of DH by design.