Best Shader Packs for Sodium and Iris 2026, Ranked

Short version, if you only want the answer: install Complementary Reimagined. It looks good on the widest range of hardware, it ships presets from Potato to Ultra so you can tune it instead of replacing it, and it gets a new build within days of a Minecraft release. If it still costs too many frames, drop to MakeUp Ultra Fast or Sildur's Vibrant Lite. If you have GPU headroom and want the shader to be the point, go to Photon or Bliss.

The rest of this page is the reasoning: what each pack costs in frames, which ones actually have a build for the Minecraft version you are on right now, and which ones Iris will refuse to run no matter what you do. If you have not set up the mods yet, start with our Sodium and Iris install guide. One shortcut worth knowing: the Iris installer pulls Sodium down with it, so on most versions you do not need to hunt for two separate jars.

What shaders work with Sodium?

None of them, on their own. This trips people up constantly, so it is worth being blunt about it.

Sodium is a rewrite of Minecraft's chunk renderer. It makes the game faster and it does nothing else. It has no shader loader in it, and dropping a shader pack zip into a Sodium-only install does nothing at all.

Iris is the part that loads shader packs, and Iris lists Sodium as a required dependency on its own project page. So the two are always installed together, and the real question is not "what shaders work with Sodium" but "what shaders work with Iris". Any pack written in the OptiFine shader format that Iris supports will load, which in practice is nearly all of them. The short list of exceptions is further down.

Best shader packs for Sodium and Iris, ranked

Complementary sits at the top for a boring reason: it is the pack that is hardest to get wrong. Reimagined and Unbound are the same lighting engine with different defaults. Reimagined keeps Minecraft's blocky clouds and square sun, Unbound swaps them for something closer to a photograph. Pick on taste, not on performance, because you can reconfigure either one into the other.

Best performance shader packs for Sodium and Iris

This is the part most lists skip. Here they are ordered by what they cost you, cheapest first, with the reason each one lands where it does.

Cheapest: MakeUp Ultra Fast

MakeUp is tagged as a Potato-tier pack by its own author, and it earns it. The design goal stated on the project page is the best quality per frame rather than the best quality outright, and the author calls out shadows and depth of field as the expensive effects you can switch off while keeping the look mostly intact. Every effect is optional, so you can strip it down to almost nothing.

Use it if your machine struggles with vanilla Minecraft before you add anything at all.

Almost as cheap: Sildur's Vibrant Lite

Sildur's ships as six separate downloads rather than one pack with presets: Lite, Medium, High, High with motion blur, Extreme, and Extreme with volumetric lighting. Sildur points integrated Intel graphics and weak systems at Lite, and describes Medium as the build for older machines and for recording. The project page states that Medium or High should be fine on a GTX 960, which is a useful anchor: if your card is stronger than that, you can climb the tiers.

That tiering is the real advantage. Moving from Lite to Medium is a two minute swap, and you never have to relearn a different settings menu.

For a wider set of options at this end of the range, see our lightweight shaders for low-end PCs guide.

Middle of the range: Complementary and BSL

Complementary ships profiles from Potato to Ultra inside a single download. On a weak machine the Potato profile is genuinely usable, and on a strong one Ultra holds up against packs that cost far more. Because the profile changes so much, "what does Complementary cost" has no single answer, which is exactly why it is the safe recommendation.

BSL is a single build you tune yourself through the shader options menu. Out of the box it is warmer and brighter than Complementary and sits in roughly the same performance bracket. It is the pack most people recognize from screenshots without knowing its name.

Expensive: Solas, Photon and Bliss

Solas describes itself as a fantasy stylized pack aiming for strong visuals at a moderate cost, and it includes colored block lighting, real-time shadows without cave light leaking, cloud shadows and volumetrics. The volumetrics are where the frames go.

Photon is the realism pick. It leans on atmospheric scattering and lighting quality, and it costs noticeably more than Complementary at comparable settings. Worth knowing before you download it: Photon is not compatible with Apple GPUs, and some of its features, colored lighting among them, only work through Iris rather than OptiFine.

Bliss is built around sky, cloud and fog work, and it is one of the packs written with Distant Horizons in mind. If you run long view distances it is a natural fit, and it is also the pack where long view distances hurt the most.

Most expensive: Rethinking Voxels

Rethinking Voxels does voxel-based lighting, which is a fundamentally more expensive approach than the screen-space tricks the other packs use. It looks like nothing else on this list and it will halve your frame rate compared to a moderate pack on the same hardware. Treat it as a showcase pack rather than something you play on. It also requires Iris specifically on current versions, since only its older beta builds run under OptiFine.

Compatible shader packs for Sodium and Iris on Fabric

Compatibility got messier in 2026 for a reason that has nothing to do with shaders. Minecraft moved to calendar-based version numbers, so the releases after the 1.21 line are 26.1 and 26.2 rather than 1.22. Plenty of shader packs still list 1.21.x as their ceiling, and a pack that has not been rebuilt for the 26.x line will usually just fail to appear or fail to apply.

Here is where the packs on this list actually stood when this page was last updated, taken from their Modrinth listings:

Two things to take from that table. Photon has no 26.2 build yet, so if you are on the newest release you are waiting. Rethinking Voxels has not seen a release since mid 2025 and tops out on the 1.21 line entirely, which means the most visually impressive pack here is also the one most likely to leave you stuck on an old Minecraft version.

That is the trade nobody mentions in ranked lists: a pack is only as good as its maintenance schedule. A gorgeous abandoned pack is not a recommendation, it is a trap you find three months later when you want to update your world.

Packs Iris will not run

Iris maintains its own list of shader packs with known problems. The ones worth knowing about:

• Continuum 2.1, Continuum RT and anything else built on the Focal Engine. Iris documents these as never going to be supported. This is architectural, not a bug waiting for a fix.
• Chronos 4.x. Broken under Iris. The newer Chronos Spectral works.
• SEUS PTGI HRR 3. Loads, but has problems when motion blur is enabled.

SEUS Renewed comes up constantly in this conversation too. It is an OptiFine-era pack and it is not maintained on the schedule the packs above are, so treat it as a screenshot tool rather than a daily driver.

Fabric, Quilt, NeoForge and old Forge packs

Iris and Sodium both publish Fabric, NeoForge and Quilt builds, and Iris ships NeoForge support from 1.21.1 upward. On the current releases Iris publishes Fabric and NeoForge builds side by side, so a modern NeoForge modpack can run the same shader packs a Fabric install can.

Older Forge and NeoForge modpacks are the exception. Those need Oculus, which is the Forge port of Iris, running on top of Embeddium, which is the Forge port of Sodium. Do not mix the two worlds: running Embeddium alongside native Iris crashes the game rather than gracefully falling back. Pick one stack per install.

Which pack for your GPU

Treat this as a starting point rather than a rule. Resolution and render distance move the answer more than the GPU model does.

If you are on the realism end of that table, our most realistic Minecraft shaders roundup goes deeper on the visual side.

Settings that move frames more than the pack does

Switching packs is the first thing everyone tries and usually the wrong lever. These four settings change your frame rate more than the difference between two packs in the same tier.

Shadow resolution and shadow distance. This is the single largest cost in almost every pack. Shadows are rendered from the sun's point of view as a second pass over the world, so shadow distance is effectively a second render distance. Cut it before you touch anything else, and cut resolution second.

Render distance. Shaders multiply the cost of every rendered chunk, so the setting that was cheap in vanilla is not cheap any more. A moderate render distance with shaders on can cost more than a very high one with shaders off. Twelve to sixteen chunks is a sensible band once shaders are running.

Volumetric lighting, clouds and fog. Pretty, expensive, and usually the first thing to switch off when you are short of frames. In most packs this is a single toggle in the shader options menu.

Reflections. Screen-space reflections on water and wet blocks are costly. Turn them down before you blame the pack.

On the Sodium side, leave entity culling on and keep mipmap settings sane. Sodium's defaults are already tuned, so there is not much to gain there compared to the shader options menu.

Installing a pack, and what to do when it does not show up

1. Install Fabric for your Minecraft version, or use the Iris installer, which handles the loader and Sodium for you.
2. Put Sodium and Iris in the mods folder if you installed them manually.
3. Drop the shader pack zip into the shaderpacks folder. Leave it zipped.
4. In game, go to Options, Video Settings, Shader Packs, then select and apply.

When a pack does not appear or does not apply, it is nearly always one of these:

• The pack has no build for your Minecraft version. Check the pack's listed support against what you are running. This is the most common cause by a wide margin, and it is why the table above exists.
• The zip got unpacked. Some browsers and archive tools extract zips automatically. Iris wants the zip or a properly structured folder, not a folder containing another folder.
• Iris and Sodium versions do not match. Each Iris build targets a specific Sodium build. Update both together, not one at a time.
• Embeddium is present on a NeoForge install. Remove it if you are running native Iris.

If you are downloading from Modrinth, our Modrinth shader download walkthrough covers the folder locations and the common mistakes in more detail.

How we picked these

Visuals are subjective. Maintenance and cost are not, so those carry the ranking. Every pack here was judged on three things: what it looks like at its default settings rather than at a hand-tuned showcase config, what it costs relative to the others on the same hardware, and whether it has a build for a current Minecraft version. The third one knocked out more packs than the first two combined.

Frame rate figures are deliberately absent. Shader performance depends on resolution, render distance, shadow distance, biome, time of day and which effects the pack ships enabled, and a number pulled from someone else's machine in a forest at noon will not predict yours. Relative cost travels between systems. Absolute numbers do not.

FAQ

Do shaders work on servers? Yes. Shader packs are entirely client-side. The server has no idea you are running them, and other players see their own settings, not yours.

Will shaders get me banned? No. They change how your client draws the world and nothing else. No anticheat treats them as cheating.

Is Iris better than OptiFine for shaders? For current versions, yes, for most people. Iris runs shaders faster, updates to new Minecraft releases sooner, and works inside the Fabric mod ecosystem. OptiFine still makes sense if you are locked to an old version or a specific Forge modpack. We compared them properly in Iris vs OptiFine.

Can Sodium run shaders on its own? No. Sodium is a renderer. Iris is the shader loader, and it needs Sodium underneath it.

Why is my FPS so low with shaders? Shadow distance or render distance, nearly always. Lower both before switching to a lighter pack, because a lighter pack at bad settings can be slower than a heavy pack at good ones.

Can I use shaders with modpacks? On Fabric and on NeoForge from 1.21.1 upward, yes, as long as you can add Sodium and Iris and nothing in the pack conflicts with them. Older Forge modpacks need Embeddium with Oculus instead.

Where should I download shaders? Modrinth, CurseForge, or the developer's own site. Sildur, Complementary and Solas all run their own pages. Avoid mirror sites that repackage the zips.

Do I need a high-end GPU? No. MakeUp Ultra Fast and Sildur's Lite are built for weak hardware, and Complementary's lower profiles run on machines that struggle with vanilla. The voxel and realism packs are the ones that need serious hardware.

Shaders are a client-side problem, but the server behind them is not. If your world stutters even with shaders off, that is TPS, not FPS, and no shader setting will fix it. Our Minecraft hosting runs on hardware picked for single-thread performance, which is what actually keeps a modded world's tick rate stable.

Related reading: Best Minecraft shaders 2026, Iris vs OptiFine shaders, lightweight shaders for low-end PCs