ShaderMetal

ShaderMetal is an experimental client-side Fabric mod that replaces Minecraft's OpenGL presentation path with a native Apple Metal renderer on Apple Silicon.

The implementation is under active development. It is currently a research preview, not a drop-in production renderer, and worlds should be backed up before testing.

Status

• Stage A: native Metal frame foundation complete.
• Stage B: Metal rasterization path complete.
• Stage C: Apple Metal ray tracing integration in progress. The current path builds native acceleration structures, performs ray intersections through Metal, and uses MetalFX temporal denoising/upscaling where supported. Visual stability and performance tuning are ongoing.

The source project is in shader-metal-template-1.21.4.

Requirements

• Minecraft Java Edition 1.21.4
• Fabric Loader 0.19.2 or newer and Fabric API
• Apple Silicon Mac with a Metal device that reports ray-tracing support
• Current development target: macOS 26 or newer
• JDK 21, CMake 3.20 or newer, xxd, and Xcode Command Line Tools

Current testing is limited to an M5 Mac on macOS 27 beta. Other Macs and mod combinations are unverified.

Build

git clone --recurse-submodules https://github.com/LingXiFox/ShaderMetal.git
cd ShaderMetal/shader-metal-template-1.21.4
./script/gradle_task.sh build

The mod JAR is written to build/libs/. All local Gradle invocations should go through script/gradle_task.sh; it disables persistent daemons and cleans project Java/game processes when the task exits.

To start the development client:

./script/gradle_task.sh runClient

Known Limitations

• Stage C still has visible ray-tracing noise, shadow/material artifacts, and frame-time spikes.
• Geometry updates, water/transparency history, dynamic entities, and some UI/input paths remain under active repair.
• MetalFX frame interpolation is not implemented.
• The current renderer is hybrid: Metal rasterization supplies primary visibility and fallback data while Metal hardware ray tracing computes experimental lighting and shadows.
• There are no stable release binaries, compatibility guarantees, or production-world safety guarantees yet.

Radiance Attribution

ShaderMetal borrows the renderer-replacement approach and the Java/Mixin/JNI proxy-contract design from Minecraft-Radiance/Radiance. Radiance and its native MCVR backend are the architectural references; ShaderMetal reimplements the native renderer for Apple Metal, Objective-C++, Apple ray-tracing acceleration structures, and MetalFX.

ShaderMetal is not affiliated with or endorsed by the Radiance project, Mojang Studios, Microsoft, or Apple. Detailed provenance and modification notes are recorded in PROVENANCE.md and THIRD_PARTY_NOTICES.md.

License

Copyright (C) 2026 LingXiFox for ShaderMetal modifications and the original Metal implementation.

ShaderMetal's project-owned source code is distributed under the GNU General Public License version 3 only (GPL-3.0-only). Third-party submodules and dependencies retain their respective licenses. See LICENSE and THIRD_PARTY_NOTICES.md.