Realistic Minecraft shaders usually get their look from global illumination, ray tracing or path tracing. Those look great but cost a lot of frame time and need a strong GPU. Filmicsoft goes the other way: get as close to a realistic, filmic image as possible without GI or ray tracing, and stay fast.
- Performance first. Every pass is measured on the GPU (
tools/bench, seeBENCHMARK.md) and kept only if it earns its cost. The post-processing chain adds about 1.2 ms per frame at 1080p on an Apple M4; the shadow map is extra and can be turned off or made cheaper (see Options). - Realism from cheap tricks. Deferred lighting with a soft sun/moon, sky ambient and warm torch light, and a real filtered shadow map for the sun and moon (with a sky-light fake as the fallback when it is off or out of range). Distance haze matches the sky. Then a film look on top: bloom, diffusion, colour grading and grain.
- Runs on macOS. Most shader packs need OpenGL features that macOS doesn't have (it stops at OpenGL 4.1), so they fail to load or render wrong on Macs. Filmicsoft is written for GLSL 330: no compute shaders, no SSBOs. It is built and tested on Apple Silicon, and should work the same on Windows and Linux.
- Light on your system. Small render targets, a packed G-buffer and low-resolution bloom keep memory use and bandwidth low, which also matters on laptops and integrated GPUs.