Minecraft draws its world with Vulkan instead of OpenGL.
More frames at high render distances, a menu of effects you assemble yourself,
and the performance settings the game never had.
1.12.2 is the build that works, and the one to install. Still being worked on.
1.16.5 lives in 1.16.5/ and is early: it draws the world, and little else yet.
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| CurseForge | the published build |
| Releases | the same jars, and the alphas that go out ahead of them |
Everything below describes the 1.12.2 build — the one that works today and the one worth installing. Work on it carries on; it is not a final version, and the alphas are where it goes first.
You also need MixinBooter 10.7
or newer in your mods folder. No launcher installs it for you, and without it the game
stops during coremod discovery on ClassNotFoundException: zone.rong.mixinbooter.IEarlyMixinLoader.
The game still owns the window and the OpenGL context. This mod mirrors vanilla's chunk geometry into Vulkan, draws the world's blocks and its creatures there, and hands the colour and the depth back into the game's own frame through shared GPU memory — so both halves line up, and everything this mod does not draw is drawn exactly as it always was.
If Vulkan is missing, the driver is old, or the two graphics cards in a laptop disagree, the game renders the way it always did and the log says why.
Named after VulkanMod, and not a port of it. VulkanMod is a Fabric mod for 1.17 and later that replaces the game's renderer outright. This one is written for Forge 1.12.2, leaves the game holding its window and its OpenGL context, and draws the terrain in Vulkan beside it. No code is shared between the two. What was taken is the idea, and a reading of that project's public release notes: where a fault it had fixed could exist here too, this code was checked for it rather than copied from theirs.
More frames, most of all at high render distances and on ordinary screens. The savings are in work the game does per chunk rather than per pixel, so they grow with the distance and shrink as the window grows: at 1080p and thirty-two chunks this draws about five times the game's own rate, at 4K about three and a half. → the numbers, at four screen sizes · what shipped when
Effects with a slider each. Waves, reflections, refraction, bloom, occlusion, swaying grass, god rays, ray-traced shadows, a round sun and moon. Every one off by default, and every one a row in a menu rather than a zip to load — turning one on costs a frame, not a recompile. → the full list
Dynamic lights. A torch in your hand lights the world. So does one you dropped, and a mob that is on fire. No chunk is rebuilt for it.
The settings 1.12.2 never gave you. Entity draw distance, animated-texture control, a background framerate cap, render distance to 64 chunks, hold-to-zoom. → all of them
It steps aside rather than fighting. Another renderer in the folder, a driver without an extension, a model built some way this mod does not understand — each one is a fallback, not a crash. → when a pack fights back
Open the menu at Options → Video Settings → VulkanModNext Settings…, or press F6. Every row states what it costs on your processor, your graphics card and in video memory separately, because which of the three you are short of decides whether a setting helps you at all. Five presets do the choosing if you would rather not: Stable, Beautiful, Balanced, Performance, Potato.
| Windows | Linux | macOS | |
|---|---|---|---|
| NVIDIA | ✅ run | ✅ run | ❌ |
| AMD | ✅ run | ✅ run | ❌ |
| Intel | ❌ |
✅ run — exercised deliberately, not assumed. AMD and NVIDIA are not the same path: where a card cannot hand its depth back in the format the game keeps, this mod hands it over through a shader instead. That second path is easy to get wrong and hard to notice, so it is tested on purpose rather than hoped for.
❌ — macOS has no Vulkan driver of its own and is out of scope.
| Phosphor, Alfheim | 🟢 | Lighting engines. They work on the world, this works on the picture. Keep them. |
| FoamFix, LoliASM / CensoredASM | 🟢 | Memory. Nothing in common with this. |
| VintageFix | 🟢 | Resource and model loading, before a frame is ever drawn. |
| BetterFps, Clumps, FastFurnace, AI Improvements, RandomPatches | 🟢 | Server-side and tick-side work. Untouched by any of this. |
| Particle Culling, Chunk Pregenerator, RoughlyEnoughIDs | 🟢 | Run alongside; all three are in the pack below. |
| OptiFine | 🟡 | Replaces the same part of the game. The Vulkan renderer does not load; its settings and speed options stay. |
| Shaders Mod (the old GLSL one) | 🟡 | Same as OptiFine, same outcome. |
| Celeritas, Actinium | 🟡 | Sodium ports — a second terrain renderer. This one steps aside. |
| Nothirium | 🟡 | Rewrites the chunk rendering engine. This one steps aside. |
| Vintagium, Relictium, Neonium | 🟡 | A Sodium port and two forks of it. Same story, same outcome. |
| Vulcanizator | 🟡 | A second Vulkan renderer, and it takes over presentation as well. This one steps aside. |
| anything else | 🔴 | None known. No mod has yet been found that cannot be in the folder at all. |
| All the Mods 3 Remix — around 340 mods | 🟢 | Loads, draws its world through this renderer, on the Beautiful preset with every effect on. Confirmed, not assumed. |
🟢 runs alongside, nothing to do · 🟡 the Vulkan renderer stands aside and the rest of the mod stays · 🔴 cannot be installed together
Standing aside is automatic and silent. You keep the settings screen, the draw distances, the
background cap, the zoom and every speed option — you just do not get the Vulkan terrain,
because two renderers cannot own the world between them. One this build has not heard of can
be named by hand in config/vulkanmodnext-standaside.txt.
- Minecraft 1.12.2 with Forge 14.23.5.2857 or compatible, or Cleanroom — both tested
- MixinBooter 10.7 or newer, installed by hand
- A 64-bit Vulkan driver on Windows or Linux
- For the terrain path, matching external-memory and semaphore extensions on both sides:
GL_EXT_memory_object_fd/GL_EXT_semaphore_fdwithVK_KHR_external_memory_fd/VK_KHR_external_semaphore_fdon Linux, and the_win32variants of the same four on Windows. The right pair is chosen for the host automatically; without them the mod loads safely and leaves terrain to OpenGL. - One graphics card doing both halves. On a machine with two, the mod compares device UUIDs at startup and stays on vanilla rendering if they differ, naming both in the log.
This is not a drop-in OptiFine replacement, and it is not finished.
- Not every effect reaches everything. The ones that run over the finished picture — occlusion, contact and cloud shadows, god rays, grading — reach creatures, particles and other mods' content for free. The rest are worked out while the blocks are drawn and stop there: a burning creeper does not glow, because what glows is recorded per block while a chunk is built and a creeper is not a block.
- A mod that builds its creatures with its own drawing code rather than out of the game's model parts is left to the game, as are chests, signs and machines.
- Screen reflections reflect what is on the screen — nothing off the edge of the frame, nothing hidden behind something nearer. Treat this one as unfinished.
- Chunk building dominates the frame while you move at high render distances. Standing still is much faster than turning, and that is the game's own work rather than this mod's.
- No connected textures, and no shader pack support.
Send one file: logs/latest.log. Play for about a minute with the world visible first;
that is the whole of the preparation.
A picture that comes out wrong has a handful of causes that look identical on screen — the world never arrived, a copy the driver refused, a pass that stood down, an effect that graded it away. So the renderer reads back a pixel of its own frame at three points and writes what it found, in plain numbers, into that file, unasked and whatever the settings are. Those numbers separate all four before anyone has to ask you anything.
Going further is optional: turn on Ultra Logging and send
logs/vulkanmodnext-diagnostics.log as well. → what else is in there
| BENCHMARKS.md | frame rates against the game's own renderer and the other renderer replacements, with the method |
| howItWork.md | how the renderer is built: what a chunk goes through, how a frame is put together, what happens when it fails |
| ROADMAP.md | what is done, planned and not planned |
| CHANGELOG.md | every release, in detail |
| ADVANCED.md | the full feature list, the JVM switches, building, diagnostics |
| 1.16.5/ | the port to 1.16.5 — early, see below |
| Issues | bugs and requests |
It exists, it is in this repository under 1.16.5/, and it is not worth installing yet.
What it does today: Vulkan comes up on the same card OpenGL is on, chunk geometry is mirrored
into it, and the world's terrain is drawn by Vulkan and composited back into the game's frame.
Measured against vanilla on the same world it produces the same picture — 427 distinct colours
against 428, the same commonest colour covering the same share of the screen.
What it does not do: any of the effects. The settings screen lists all 106 of them and says plainly how many actually steer anything, which at the time of writing is 19. The terrain switch ships off, because a renderer that takes over the world by default before anybody has seen it work is a renderer that gets uninstalled.
Two things about it are already better than the 1.12.2 build, and both come from the version rather than from us: the game is on LWJGL 3 already, so the whole two-class-loader construction is gone, and a 1.16.5 vertex carries its own normal.
GNU LGPL v3. See LICENSE.