RenderPearl

• Significantly improved Shadows and Volumetric Light

  • Volumetric Light is now enabled by default and has three new customization options: VL Base, Sun and Sky

  • Lighting now uses shadow samplers, allowing for smoother shadows and light rays

  • Modified Light Color

  • Shadows & Colored Shadows are now always enabled

  • Shadow Distance Culling is now 3D, improving performance

  • Added Shadow Fade option (Misc)

  • Waves now cast shadows

• Added Phong lighting with Specular Reflectivity & Shininess options

• Replaced Sun Brightness with Sun & Sky Bloom options

• Rewrote most of gbuffers, removing unnecessary calculations and alpha tests, allowing the use the GLSL Early Fragment Test instead of a custom depth test, simplifying the code, fixing shadow rendering while moving the camera and possibly improving performance

• Improved Clouds

• Made more blocks and items emissive and added a range of brightness (1-15) for emissive blocks

• Added Color Format, Skip Clear and Immutable Constants optimization/misc options

• Fixed Hand lighting direction

• Fixed Block Entity rendering in The End

• Fixed Shadow rendering on Entities

• Modified FXAA (no longer based on BSL)

• Optimized FXAA and Sharpening

• Improved Cloud rendering using Cylindrical Fog
• Fixed Volumetric Light in The End
• Improved Shadow Bias
• Attempted to fix Sun/Moon transparency issues

• Improved and added more Tonemap Operators
  • Changed default: Reinhard-Jodie -> Uchimura
  • Expect colors and brightness to be significantly different (you can undo this by switching back to the old default)
• Added Waves on water
  • Height and Speed is customizable
• Added Bloom (disabled by default)
  • Strength and Radius is customizable
• Moved Color options to a separate menu and added Saturation slider
• Improved Sky, especially at night
• Added Shadows in The End
• Fixed Nether lighting

• Simplified Variable Penumbra Shadows, improving overall shaderpack performance by about 15%
• Changed order of Post Processing effects, removed a built-in color filter and enabled Automatic Exposure by default
• Improved Fog calculation
• Added Volumetric Light (disabled by default)
• Disabled Translucent Shadows by default
• Recalibrated Shadow Bias and fixed close up shadow artifacts
• Made more blocks emissive
• Sun is now hidden when it's raining
• Removed Emissive Map support
  • Changed default Emissive Color value: 15 -> 13
  • Changed Emissive Color value range: 10-30 -> 10-20
• Changed default Sunlight Strength value: 40 -> 30
• Improved some option descriptions

• Major changes to how Shadows and Fog work
  • Switched from deferred to forward rendering
  • Shadows now apply to transparent surfaces (even multiple layers!)
  • Improved Colored Shadows
  • Removed Shadow Blur Quality option
  • Lowered default Shadow Distance to 10 chunks
• Added Vignette & Underwater Overlay support
• Improved how Emissive Blocks & Items work internally
  • Added a lot of new emissive blocks
  • Also added Emissive Flowers and Emissive Fungi options
• Added Translucent Shadows option
  • Allows sunlight to slightly shine through thin surfaces like banners and leaves
• Significantly improved lighting in The Nether and The End
• Increased Lava Fog
• Removed Exposure option as it was causing issues with colors.
  • Colors should now be significantly more vibrant and Vanilla-like
• Added Water Transparency option
• Changed Sun Brightness range from 1-10 to 1-5 with smaller increments
• Fixed bugs:
  • Flickering when sunlight is parallel to a surface
  • Transparent hand
  • BurgessHDR Tonemap Operator causing error
  • Sharpening option causing error

• Made Skulk Catalyst emissive
• Slightly optimized Tone mapping and Fog
• Renamed Realistic Sun Path to Sun Path Rotation and made it a slider
• Added option value suffixes (requires Iris 1.6.4+)
• Improved option descriptions
• Enabled Underwater Overlay

• Improved shadows behind water and transparent blocks
• Fixed Water Fog
• Improved GUI Text/Language
• Removed Vertex Fog as it was incompatible with the latest Iris
• All Shadow-related code is now disabled in the nether and end for improved performance

• Merged Shadow Focus Distance into the Shadow Distance option
• Improved Shadow Blur and Colors
• Improved Fog
  • Better color depending on time of day
  • Terrain outside Fog now becomes transparent

• Fixed dark Fog at night
• Made Shadow Distance an option in the shader pack rather than using the Iris option
  • This allows the shader pack to know the current Shadow Distance and skip checking for shadows outside, improving performance
  • It also allows Shadow Distance to be controlled by the current Profile
• Updated GUI
  • Adds a little symbol to show approximate performance impact of each option
    • Red - High
    • Gold - Medium
    • Yellow - Low
    • Aqua - None

• Fixed Composite Scale
• Optimized Automatic Exposure

• Fixed Shadows on Water
• Changed how sunlight colors work
• Lowered default Water Fog
• Fixed Automatic Exposure
• Updated fully to GLSL 4.60
• Improved performance when both Shadows and Fog are enabled
• Improved Clouds Fog and Color

• Improved Fog and Clouds
• Added more settings for Shadows (you can now toggle different types of Shadows or even disable them entirely for a massive performance increase)
• Improved Sun and Ambient Light Colors (they now change depending the on time of day)
• Made Water more transparent

Almost the entire pack has been changed in this update, and some of the most important changes include:

• Updated to support and make use of...
  • Minecraft 1.19.4
  • Iris 1.6
  • GLSL 4.60 Core (mostly)
• Significantly improved performance
• Removed support for OptiFine
• Simplified and improved Colored Shadows to no longer depend on block.properties
• Removed Bloom because it made the pack to a lot more complex and didn't look very good
• Updated GUI
• Removed "POM" because it didn't work properly
• Removed Color Precision and Noise Texture Resolution settings as they weren't useful
• Reduced file size and count
• Improved Emissive Items
• Lots of bug fixes