PureScale 1.3

Hey everyone, First of all, I'd like to thank pesto_man for his contributions to this mod.

This one took a while. 1.2.18 got a lot of feedback on Discord, YouTube and CurseForge, and instead of patching things one at a time I went back through the whole thing. Some of what you reported was easy to fix, some of it turned out to be bigger than it looked, and a few things still need more testing on hardware I don't have. I've tried to be upfront about all of that below.

Thanks to everyone who sent crash logs, screenshots and long descriptions of weird bugs. They helped more than you'd think.

Fewer files to pick from

Fabric and Quilt now get one JAR per edition. It carries a build for every supported Minecraft version inside it and loads the right one when the game starts. If you play on more than one version, the same file works for all of them.

NeoForge and Forge still use one file per Minecraft version. Those loaders don't have a clean way to pick a build at startup, so splitting them stays safer for now.

If something is missing (Sodium, Fabric API), the Fabric JAR now tells you exactly what to install instead of showing a wall of confusing errors.

Crashes and startup problems

• Opening the settings (F9) could crash the game with "Can only blur once per frame", mostly together with other menu mods like Blur or Ixeris. PureScale now handles that case and just skips its extra blur when another mod already blurred the frame.
• Crashing on every launch until you edited the config by hand. Two separate fixes here:
  • If the config file can't be read, PureScale starts disabled and leaves your file alone instead of overwriting it with defaults.
  • Modern only: if a native component (DLSS, FSR 4.1, DLSS Frame Generation) takes the whole game down, PureScale notices on the next launch and turns that component off for one session. The game falls back to the built-in upscalers instead of crashing again. On the launch after that, it tries again.
• Fixed a case in the Modern render path where a failed GPU setup could be reused on later frames. This might have caused some of the black screen reports. I can't promise it's the only cause.
• The DLSS Frame Generation bridge used to wait up to 10 seconds whenever the GPU stopped responding, which looks exactly like a freeze. That limit is now 2 seconds, after which it gives up and falls back. It also no longer stops the CPU after every presented frame. On my RTX 5070 I couldn't measure a clear FPS difference from this, so don't expect miracles, but it should stop the long hangs.

Frame generation

• "Off" now actually means off with FSR 3. Before, picking FSR 3 quietly turned on frame generation even when you'd set it to off. If you liked that behavior, just pick 2× yourself.
• Fixed a bunch of "this pass wants a depth texture" warnings that were spamming the log every frame on 1.21.11. In my test that went from about 480 warnings to zero.

Held items and hands (Modern, 1.20.1 and 1.21.1 with Iris)

The ghosting on held items when you move fast was one of the most reported problems. A community member (thank you!) shared a test build that fixed it with Iris on 1.21.1. I rebuilt that approach properly into the mod:

• pixels that belong to your hand get their motion corrected,
• after DLSS reconstruction, the original hand image is put back on top.

It switches itself off when Iris isn't there. Translucent held items and the swing animation itself still aren't perfect. I tested it on synthetic GPU data. I haven't tested it in every shader pack, so please tell me how it looks in yours.

Settings screen

• Every version now has the tabbed settings screen, Normal and Modern, from 1.7.10 all the way to 26.3, on Fabric, Forge and NeoForge. Before, a lot of older versions were stuck with the old layout and missed the fixes that came with the new one.
• Removed Static Refinement, Motion Sharpen and Motion Smoothness (called "High resolution motion" on the oldest versions). They caused more confusion than they were worth. If you had them on, they're switched back to safe values automatically.
• Toasts like the VSync warning no longer draw over the tabs while the settings are open. They wait until you close the menu.
• The settings screen on NeoForge 1.21.11 could ignore mouse clicks. Fixed for both editions and checked in-game.

Versions and loaders

• Everything now properly says 1.3. Some 1.2.18 files said 1.3 in the filename but 1.2.18 inside, sorry about that.
• Fabric versions were declared too loosely. A 1.20.1 build would happily load on 1.20.6 and then break. Each build now only loads on the versions it was actually made for.
• Fabric no longer asks for a newer Fabric Loader than it needs. Loader 0.19.3 users couldn't load it before.
• Old Forge versions (1.7.10, 1.8, 1.8.9, 1.12.2) didn't even build from source anymore. That's fixed, and they're back in this release.

Known issues

I'd rather tell you than have you find out the hard way:

• DLSS Frame Generation 2× can still leave a faint burn-in on some systems, and some people still see occasional 1% low drops. I'm still working on both.
• Fullscreen freeze when joining a world with frame generation on: the 10-second wait above was a likely cause, but I haven't reproduced the freeze itself yet. If it still happens to you, alt-tabbing or switching to windowed and back fixes it for now. A log would help a lot.
• On some Fabric versions, Modern doesn't include the NVIDIA/AMD features yet (1.21, 1.21.4, 1.21.6–1.21.10). On those it behaves like Normal.
• On 1.7.10–1.18.2 the settings screen is a lighter version of the new one: same tabs, simpler cards.
• Distant Horizons flicker, invisible name tags and the integrated-GPU artifacts are on my list but not fixed in this release.
• Quilt: the Fabric JAR should work there like any other Fabric mod, but I've only tested it on Fabric so far.
• FSR 4.1 on Radeon: the crash protection above should stop the "can't start the game anymore" loop, but I couldn't test FSR 4.1 itself without the hardware.

Supported versions

Same list for Normal and Modern.

• Fabric / Quilt (one JAR): 1.16–1.16.5, 1.17, 1.17.1, 1.18–1.18.2, 1.19–1.19.4, 1.20–1.20.6, 1.21, 1.21.1, 1.21.4, 1.21.6–1.21.11, 26.1 (also 26.1.1 and 26.1.2), 26.2, 26.3
• NeoForge: 1.20.1–1.20.6, 1.21.1, 1.21.11, 26.1, 26.2, 26.3
• Forge: 1.7.10, 1.8, 1.8.9, 1.9, 1.9.4, 1.12, 1.12.1, 1.12.2, 1.14.4, 1.15–1.15.2, 1.16.1–1.16.5, 1.17.1, 1.18–1.18.2, 1.19–1.19.4, 1.20, 1.20.1–1.20.4, 1.20.6, 1.21.1

Installing

• Fabric / Quilt: drop the single JAR from Fabric-Quilt into your mods folder. You need Fabric API. Sodium is recommended but no longer required, so versions without a Sodium release (like 1.16) work too. PureScale Modern on 26.x needs Fabric Loader 0.19.5 or newer.
• Forge / NeoForge: Embeddium, Rubidium and Sodium are no longer required, just supported. If Embeddium crashes on your setup (it does on some newer NVIDIA cards with NeoForge 1.20.2), you can now run PureScale without it.
• NeoForge / Forge: pick the file matching your Minecraft version.
• Only install one edition: Normal or Modern, not both.
• Modern downloads its NVIDIA/AMD runtime separately the first time you use those features. No DLLs are bundled in the JAR.

If something breaks, please send the crash report or latest.log. A screenshot plus "it's broken" is a lot harder to fix.

Have fun, and thanks for sticking around.