Guide
About Rockstar Shaders
By Ryleigh Newman · Published
Rockstar Shaders is a Fabric mod for Minecraft Java Edition 26.3 that replaces how the game draws the world, for macOS on Apple Silicon. It runs on Minecraft's own Vulkan backend, which on a Mac is MoltenVK, and puts a Metal ray-tracing side-car beside it for sun shadows, sky visibility, one bounce of global illumination, water reflections and fog occlusion. The current version is 1.0, the builds are on Patreon, and the source and the issue tracker are on GitHub.
I am Ryleigh Newman and I made it, alone, because I play Minecraft on a Mac and every shader pack I wanted to run was built for a loader that does not support the Mac I have. This page is the plain account: what it is, why it exists, what it took, what the Patreon is for, and what alpha means here.
Get it on PatreonMinecraft 26.3, Fabric, macOS on Apple silicon. Install guide. Source and bug reports on GitHub.
What it is
A single jar, rockstarshaders-1.0.jar, in the mods folder next to the Fabric API. There is no shader pack to download and no shaderpacks folder; the shaders are inside the jar, and the renderer in the code is called Nacre. It needs Minecraft Java 26.3, Fabric Loader 0.19.5 or newer, the Fabric API and Java 25 or newer, and it is client only, so nothing is installed on a server. On the first launch it asks at the title screen to switch the game's graphics API to Vulkan and quit; after the restart, K in a world opens the settings, 82 of them on 11 pages, plus an Advanced page with about 600 tune keys.
What it draws: a deferred physically based renderer with cascaded shadows and the Metal traces on top; a water engine with a fetch-limited wave spectrum, a ripple simulation, caustics, surf and falling water; an atmosphere-lit sky with the square sun and the blocky clouds; volumetric fog and god rays; traced and screen-space reflections; wind, rain, snow, puddles and lightning; connected textures, emissive textures, custom entity models and custom skies read from OptiFine-format resource packs with no other mod; an extended horizon out to 1,024 blocks; temporal anti-aliasing, auto exposure, bloom and AgX grading. The Nether and the End render with their own sky, fog and ambient. The help pages cover each part.
Why I built it
Because the Mac was left out. Iris, the loader almost every modern pack targets, lists all drivers on Apple Silicon Macs as not supported on its driver page, with known crash issues on common shaders, and says it depends on OpenGL, which Apple has deprecated; I read that on 2026-09-19 and it matched what I saw. Bedrock Edition's ray tracing needs Windows 64-bit and a DirectX hardware ray tracing GPU, per Microsoft's own requirements page, read the same day. So both roads to good light in Minecraft ended before the Mac.
Minecraft 26.3 ships its own Vulkan renderer, and on a Mac that runs through MoltenVK on top of Metal, and Metal is where the side-car does its ray tracing. That was the opening: hook the Vulkan renderer, and put a Metal ray tracer beside it that shares the GPU with the game. MoltenVK exposes no ray query extension, so the tracing is not Vulkan ray tracing; it is Metal, reached through the VK_EXT_metal_objects extension, against the game's own chunk vertex buffers. I built it for the machine on my desk first, and I say so everywhere on this site, because that is the honest size of what has been tested.
What it took
A renderer, not a pack. Terrain goes into a G-buffer and is shaded in a deferred lighting pass; four shadow cascades are packed into one atlas; the Metal side-car has six gates and a self-test before it is allowed to trace. The water engine has a fetch map, a ripple field of 512 cells and its own reflection resolve. The readers for the OptiFine resource-pack formats, connected textures, emissive textures, custom entity models with the full animation language, random entity textures and custom skies, were written from the published formats. The settings screen is 82 settings and a generated Advanced page, with tune changes applied by rebuilding the pipelines in about a second.
Then the measuring, which is most of it. A GPU timer writes a timestamp between every pass and reads it back two frames late, so every number on this site is a measurement at a named resolution and scene. The rule I hold myself to is on every page: no frame rate without the resolution and the machine, and no claim for a machine I have not run.
What the Patreon is for
The alpha builds go to Patreon supporters first. I chose that instead of a public download for two reasons. The first is time: the renderer, the side-car and the water engine cost real hours to make, and a first release costs more hours to support than to ship, because every report needs a log read and a capture reproduced. The second is size: a small first wave means I can read every report, and the reports are the point of a first release. Supporters get each build as it ships.
I do not promise dates, for builds or for platforms, because the record has none, and I will not say Windows or Linux are coming until they run. The software is proprietary and closed source, licensed for personal use, so until it is, the honest phrase is declared, not licensed.
What alpha means
The settings screen says it on its front page: Rockstar Shaders Rendering Engine, release 1.0. As a first release, settings can move between builds, some combinations are untested and a few things are known to be wrong, so please report what you see, with a screenshot if you can. In practice it means this. It renders the whole game. It is measured and certified on one machine, an M4 Max with 48 GB, and it has never been run on anyone else's; an M1 will be slower and I have no number for it.
Known and written down rather than fixed: the first-person player shadow is wired but does not appear; foam, spray and white water are compiled out by default; block light leaks through thin walls; dynamic lights cast no shadows; custom skies are not reflected in water; Generate horizon does not save what it generates, Pregenerate world does; the ripple field restarts from flat when the renderer is rebuilt; MetalFX upscaling is off because it lost detail. Two defaults moved in the two days before the snapshot this site is written from, and they will move again. The what is new page records each build.
What it writes
Two places. The settings live in config/rockstarshaders.json in the Minecraft folder: the top-level switches, a tune map holding only the keys you changed, and a props map of the restart-only switches. An older config/vitreous.json, from the builds that shipped under the working name Vitreous, is copied across once, and a file that does not parse is kept beside the new one as rockstarshaders.json.bad. The log lines go into the game's own logs/latest.log under the logger name RockstarShaders. A setting the game was launched with on the command line is shown grayed on the screen and cannot be moved there. The settings front page has a button that opens rockstarshaders.com through the game's own link confirmation screen. What this site does is on the privacy page.
How to reach me
Bugs go to GitHub issues or the Patreon post for the build, and I read every one. Send logs/latest.log from the Minecraft folder and a screenshot with the F3 overlay up; for a performance report, a screenshot of the Show pass timings overlay and the window size, because a frame time only means something at the size it was measured. The log lines to look for start with RockstarShaders, one word. The reporting page has the full list and the troubleshooting page has the lines that explain a vanilla-looking world.
Facts for the record
| Name | Rockstar Shaders |
| Mod id | rockstarshaders |
| Version | 1.0, shown in the game as Release 1.0 |
| Minecraft | Java Edition 26.3, on the Vulkan graphics API |
| Loader | Fabric Loader 0.19.5 or newer, plus the Fabric API |
| Java | 25 or newer |
| Side | Client only |
| Platform | macOS on Apple Silicon, M1 or later is the target; tested on one M4 Max with 48 GB |
| Not supported | Windows, Linux, Intel Macs, OpenGL |
| Ray tracing | Metal side-car, libvrt.dylib and vrt.metallib inside the jar, through VK_EXT_metal_objects |
| License | Proprietary, closed source: personal use, no redistribution |
| Builds | patreon.com/rockstarshaders |
| Source and issues | github.com/ryleighnewman/RockstarShaders |
| Config file | config/rockstarshaders.json |
| Former name | Vitreous; the renderer inside is called Nacre |
| Developer | Ryleigh Newman |
Get it on PatreonMinecraft 26.3, Fabric, macOS on Apple silicon. Install guide. Source and bug reports on GitHub.
Related
Sources
- https://www.patreon.com/rockstarshaders (read 2026-09-19)
- https://github.com/ryleighnewman/RockstarShaders (read 2026-09-19)
- https://github.com/IrisShaders/Iris/blob/multiloader-new/docs/usage/drivers.md (read 2026-09-19)
- https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/minecraft/creator/documents/rtxgettingstarted?view=minecraft-bedrock-stable (read 2026-09-19)
Questions
Is Rockstar Shaders free?
The builds are for Patreon supporters. The software is proprietary and closed source, licensed for personal use; the GitHub repository holds the license, the privacy policy and the issue tracker, not the code.
Which Macs does it run on?
Apple Silicon, M1 or later, is the target, and it has been tested on exactly one machine, an M4 Max with 48 GB. Intel Macs are not supported: the side-car needs a Metal device with ray tracing.
Does it work on Windows or Linux?
No. The ray tracing is a Metal side-car, so Windows and Linux are not supported and not tested, and I will not say when that changes because I do not know.
Is it a shader pack for Iris or OptiFine?
No. It is a Fabric mod with its own renderer inside the jar. It needs no OptiFine, Iris or Sodium, and it reads OptiFine-format resource pack features such as connected textures and custom entity models on its own.
Who makes it?
Ryleigh Newman, one person, who also wrote every page on this site. The first builds shipped under the working name Vitreous, and an old config/vitreous.json is migrated automatically.