ApexShader - Advanced Ray Tracing Shader with Dynamic Weather and Post Processing Effects

ApexShader addresses the lack of physically accurate lighting and dynamic weather in Minecraft by combining screen-space ray tracing with a full weather simulation. This shader is designed for players who own high-end graphics hardware (NVIDIA RTX 2000 series or newer, AMD RX 6000 series or newer) and seek photorealistic visuals without relying on external mods for illumination or atmospheric effects. It targets survival builders, cinematic creators, and performance-conscious users who need configurable settings to balance visual fidelity with frame rate.

The ray tracing system uses Screen-Space Global Illumination (SSGI) for long-distance light propagation and indirect light bouncing across surfaces. Ambient Occlusion (AO) reacts to material textures defined in resource packs, adding realistic contact shadows. Subsurface scattering models light transmission through translucent blocks like leaves and ice. Screen-space reflections provide real-time dynamic reflections on water, metal, and glass. Entity shadow distance allows adjustable projection ranges to optimize performance on mid-range cards.

The weather system cycles through ten daily weather profiles, each with configurable precipitation intensity and wind direction. Multi-layer cloud rendering supports small cumulus, large stratiform, and high-altitude thin clouds, each with independent coverage, density, and altitude sliders. Volumetric fog simulates atmospheric light scattering and god rays. Lunar phase-dependent moonlight adjusts nocturnal brightness based on the moon’s actual illuminated portion, while realistic moon textures derived from NASA lunar data add surface detail.

• Temporal Anti-Aliasing (TAA) accumulates frame history to reduce jagged edges while preserving detail, with optional sharpening filter.
• Depth-of-field and motion blur post-processing effects with adjustable focal distance and blur intensity for cinematic shots.
• Bloom with adaptive tonemapping handles both bright sunlight and dark cave scenes without clipping or color banding.
• Colored lighting respects emissive textures and colored light sources from resource packs, enabling dynamic redstone lighting and stained glass color bleeding.
• Performance metrics overlay shows GPU/CPU time per frame, VRAM usage, and shader setting impact, helping users fine-tune for their hardware.

Minimum requirements: Minecraft Java Edition 1.18+, OptiFine HD U6 or Iris 1.6+, OpenGL 4.5 compatible GPU (NVIDIA GTX 1060 / AMD RX 580 or better). Recommended: 8GB VRAM, 16GB system RAM, and an RTX 3060 / RX 6700 XT for 60+ FPS at 1080p. ApexShader does not support integrated graphics (Intel UHD, AMD Vega 8) or older OpenGL 3.x drivers. The ray tracing features are screen-space only and cannot simulate pure path tracing; they rely on camera-facing data, so reflections and global illumination may miss objects outside the view frustum.