Refrax is a shaderpack purpose-built for Iris, delivering colored lighting and semi-realistic shading without the heavy performance cost that usually accompanies such features. It targets players who want rich atmosphere and depth in their Minecraft worlds but are held back by older or mid-range hardware. By making smart trade-offs under the hood, Refrax keeps frame rates playable where many other shaderpacks would choke, making it a practical choice for everyday survival building, exploration, or casual play on a wide range of systems.

The pack offers seven distinct performance profiles—from Potato (160+ fps) to Overdrive (~20 fps on a GTX 1650 Ti at 1080p) —so you can dial in exactly the balance your machine can handle. A dedicated performance mode slider pushes this further, scaling back sample counts on clouds, god rays, ambient occlusion, screen-space reflections, and water wave octaves with very little visual compromise; in most scenes the difference is barely noticeable. Even on the Overdrive preset, the slider can recover a meaningful number of frames, making the shader viable on integrated graphics or older dedicated GPUs that would struggle with heavier packs.

Refrax shines by solving the most common shader complaint: the punishing performance hit that often comes with colored lighting and reflections. It gives you volumetric light, responsive water, soft shadows, and blooming highlights while keeping 1% lows stable and input lag minimal. This makes it especially well-suited for players who enjoy modded worlds, large builds, or multiplayer servers where consistent frames matter more than pixel-perfect photorealism.

Colored lighting system that casts tinted light from torches, glowstone, lava, and other sources, adding mood and depth.
Seven adjustable performance profiles (Potato, Low, Medium, High, Very High, Extreme, Overdrive) with documented FPS targets on a GTX 1650 Ti.
Performance mode slider that reclaims frames with negligible visual loss by intelligently reducing sample counts on expensive effects.
Semi-realistic water and reflections with customizable wave octaves and screen-space reflections that stay fast even on low-end hardware.
Original, lightweight codebase inspired by Photon and Complementary Reimagined, avoiding heavy post-processing bloat.

Requirements and honest limits: Refrax requires the Iris shader loader on Minecraft Java Edition 1.18.2 or newer. Versions 1.17.x, 1.18, and 1.18.1 are unsupported and will not load or will fail to render many blocks correctly. The shader partially works on 1.16.5 but lacks colored lighting and block-breaking particles. A dedicated graphics card is recommended for Medium and higher profiles, while the Potato and Low presets can function on modern integrated GPUs. Colored lighting and reflections look best on semi-realistic resource packs; vanilla textures work but may show some visual inconsistencies with the new lighting model.

Refrax – Performance Colored Lighting Shader