Description PrimeCinematic is a cinematic shader for Iris, written for Minecraft 26.2 and 26.3. The goal is footage that looks good without looking like a different game: vanilla's colours stay recognisable, and the light is what changes.
New in 2.0 A sky worth looking at. A deeper daytime blue and warm-to-violet sunsets. A real round sun with a soft corona replaces the blocky square, and the moon follows its phases.
Its own clouds. Soft, sunlit clouds that change from day to day and close in when it rains. You can choose Off, Vanilla, Fast or Fancy.
Water that reads as water. Lakes take on depth-based colour, so they read from far away. The lake bed shows through the ripples, trees and hills reflect in the surface, and caustics move across sunlit lake beds.
Glowing foliage. Leaves and grass light up when the sun is behind them, which gives the golden-hour look.
Temporal anti-aliasing. No more shimmer on leaves, grass, fences or your hand, with a sharpening slider next to it.
Auto exposure, nights and weather. Caves open up gently and snow doesn't blow out. Nights stay readable and rain is soft. Border fog hides the edge of the world, and the Nether and the End get their own fog and light.
Faster by default. Entities cast shadows only within a quarter of the shadow distance, which halves the CPU work of the shadow pass. The default Balanced preset runs about 16% more FPS than 1.x Balanced at 1080p in our tests, with the same GPU time at 4K.
Five presets Low: 512 shadow map, 80-block shadows, light shafts, vanilla clouds, no TAA. Costs about what 1.x Performance did.
Performance: TAA, the pack's clouds, water refraction, light shafts and 80-block shadows. Lighter than Balanced.
Balanced (default): TAA, the new sky and clouds, water refraction and caustics, foliage glow, auto exposure and bloom. Faster than 1.x Balanced.
Cinematic: the full look. Adds ambient occlusion, water reflections, fancy clouds and 176-block soft shadows, for about a third more GPU time than 1.x Balanced.
Ultra: 2048 shadow map, 224-block shadows, everything maxed.
Every value behind the presets is also a slider with a plain-English tooltip, grouped into Shadows, Lighting, Atmosphere, Water, Anti-Aliasing and Post Processing.
Requirements Minecraft Java 26.2 or 26.3 with Iris and Sodium for that version (tested: Iris 1.11.2 with Sodium 0.9.1 on 26.2, Iris 1.11.7 with Sodium 0.9.2 on 26.3), and a GPU that supports OpenGL 4.3.
Install Put the downloaded .zip, without unzipping it, into your shaderpacks folder. Then open Options → Video Settings → Shader Packs, select PrimeCinematic and press Apply.
Using 26.3 26.3 added an experimental Vulkan renderer, and Iris only runs on OpenGL. If Iris says it cannot run on Vulkan, accept its offer to switch (the game closes; start it again), or set Video Settings → Graphics API to Default or Prefer OpenGL and restart.