Releases: VLOD-ZDOV/VulkanMod-Next
Release list
0.10.0-alpha.7
The first alpha with a 1.16.5 build attached. The 1.12.2 build is unchanged
from alpha.6.
1.16.5 port
The 1.16.5 build catches up: from 43 of the 1.12.2 build's 106 settings doing
something to 85. Every one marked working was turned to both ends in the same
flight and the two frames compared; the ones that could not be shown that way
are still marked "not yet ported" in the menu.
- Changed: the Vulkan terrain is now on by default, as on 1.12.2. It was
off while the port had never been shown to draw a correct frame. - Added: presets. Stable, Balanced, Performance, Potato, Beautiful, Golden
Hour, Cold Front and Soft Film, with the same values as on 1.12.2, on a tab of
their own. Number settings are sliders now instead of a hundred clicks. - Added: material tags. The terrain shader now knows water, leaves, plants,
glass, ice and lava apart, which turns on leaf glow, leaf shadows, water
waves, caustics, reflections and wet surfaces. - Added: bloom, ambient occlusion and the tone pass over the finished frame.
They were on the Vulkan side and nothing called them. - Fixed: water, lava, fire and every other animated block stood still when
drawn through Vulkan. The animation frames never reached the renderer's copy
of the block atlas. - Added: creatures, particles and rain and snow drawn through Vulkan, as on
1.12.2. Anything the renderer cannot take — glinting armour, glowing outlines,
modded particle types, a refused batch — is left to the game rather than lost. - Added: the CPU savings from 1.12.2 that apply here: the far-corner frustum
test, near chunks built off the render thread, short section lists for the
terrain layers and block entities, off-screen chunk preloading and smart
animations. Two of 1.12.2's do not apply to this version's engine and say so
in the menu. - Fixed: the directional light setting never reached the shader.
- Added: dynamic lights (held and dropped light sources, burning mobs),
fog switch and fog distance, time and weather control, round sun and moon with
size and warmth, cloud tint, frame graph, diagnostics file, render distance up to 128, chunk
build threads, animated textures switch, vanilla buffer drop, and handing
water and glass back to the game. - Ported but not yet shown working, so still greyed in the menu: zoom,
background frame cap, entity and block entity distance, explosion particle
budget, update check, near plane. - Ray tracing and the settings built on it are labelled as impossible on this
version rather than "not yet": the game's own Vulkan bindings predate it.
0.10.0-alpha.6
The sixth alpha — published to be reported against. Flown in-game with the Vulkan validation layer on and no findings; the Windows-only fix below has not been tried on Windows yet.
- No more black world after the first frame or a resize on some drivers: a check of the shared targets set the game's own frame to read from nothing, which also switched off occlusion and light shafts. This came back in the last alpha.
- Resizing the window or toggling fullscreen no longer leaves OpenGL and Vulkan a frame out of step for the rest of the session.
- The renderer no longer frees geometry the water and glass pass may still be drawing from.
- Drivers that follow the Vulkan rules to the letter no longer risk drawing every chunk in the same place.
- Presets turn Vulkan Water and Glass back on, so their water effects actually show.
- Windows: a resize no longer keeps the old render targets in video memory until the game closes.
- The game no longer freezes forever if the graphics driver gives up, and no longer reports a crash on the way out.
- Ray-traced shadows no longer build from geometry outside its buffer.
Full list in CHANGELOG.md.
0.10.0-alpha.5
The fifth alpha — published to be reported against. Nothing here has been checked in-game yet.
- No more pale shadow beside tall grass and blocks: grass and single blocks were counted as a roof by the cloud-shadow pass, and the occlusion blur spread across the edges of objects.
- Calmer water: no shadow grain on the surface, filtered refraction, waves fade out in the distance instead of sparkling, reflections that no longer flicker, softer shorelines.
- Traced shadows now sit under what casts them:
- faces are turned toward the eye, not the feet;
- shadows no longer come away from their objects at a low sun;
- north- and south-facing walls now receive shadows;
- things just off screen still cast shadows;
- grass no longer casts square shadows;
- mob shadows no longer lag behind them;
- cloud shadows are in the right place.
- Android (PojavLauncher and its forks): the Vulkan part stays off and the game runs normally, with the vanilla render distance limit.
- Dozens of fixes found by reading the code, plus comments that now match it.
Full list: CHANGELOG.md
Full Changelog: 0.10.0-alpha.4...0.10.0-alpha.5
0.10.0-alpha.4
Full Changelog: 0.10.0-alpha.3...0.10.0-alpha.4
-
Major Identity Change:
- Renamed to VulkanMod Next: The mod has been rebranded to reflect its expansion to newer Minecraft versions (development for 1.16.5 is now underway).
- Seamless Migration: Your old settings have been automatically migrated to the new configuration file. JAR files are also now clearly labeled with their specific Minecraft version to avoid confusion.
-
New Visual & Accessibility Features:
- Color Vision Correction: A specialized accessibility feature for Protanopia, Deuteranopia, and Tritanopia. Rather than a simple filter, it reconstructs missing color information to help players with color blindness see the world more clearly.
- Leaf Glow: Adds a realistic "translucency" effect to trees. When looking toward the sun, leaves will appear to glow as light passes through them, preventing canopies from looking like solid dark blocks.
- New Visual Presets: Added three new atmospheric looks:
- Golden Hour: Warm, hazy, sunset vibes.
- Cold Front: Sharp, high-contrast, and crisp.
- Soft Film: Lower exposure with a smoother, glowing feel.
- Gamma Control: A dedicated slider to fine-tune the brightness and depth of the image without breaking the visual grading.
-
Stability & Performance Improvements:
- Graceful VRAM Management: If your graphics card runs out of memory, the mod will now "turn away" distant chunks rather than crashing or corrupting your world. This creates a small hole in the distance instead of a broken game session.
- Texture Optimization: Reduced CPU overhead by optimizing how animated textures (like fire and portals) are uploaded to the GPU.
- Precise Diagnostics: Added high-precision timing for specific visual passes (glow, grading, etc.), making it easier to identify exactly what is affecting your frame rate.
-
UI/UX Improvements:
- Smarter Settings Search: You can now search for settings by their values. For example, searching "fixed" will now correctly find the "Time Control" setting.
- Clearer Preset Definitions: Clarified exactly what the "Stable" and "Balanced" presets do to your configuration.
0.10.0-alpha.3
Full Changelog: 0.10.0-alpha.2...0.10.0-alpha.3
-
Performance & Optimization:
- Enabled Quad Facing Groups: A major optimization that allows the renderer to skip processing faces that are facing away from you (such as the underside of a floor or the back of a wall). This can boost FPS by up to 13% depending on your resolution.
- Enabled Chunk Vertex Packing: Dramatically reduces VRAM usage (from ~428 MiB down to 240 MiB), which is crucial for enabling very high render distances. This provides an additional 7–18% FPS boost.
- CPU Efficiency: Enabled "Short Layer Filter Lists" and "Chunk List Caching," which reduce the workload on your processor, especially helpful when playing with heavy modpacks or on slower CPUs.
- Reduced Input Lag: The "Performance" preset has been updated to remove an unnecessary buffer frame, reducing input latency.
- Smart Safety Feature: To prevent visual glitches (like sprite bleeding), the mod will now automatically disable vertex packing if you are using extremely large texture atlases (above 8192px).
-
Visual Fixes:
- Improved Rain Logic: Fixed an issue where rain would "leak" through solid rock; surfaces under overhangs or trees will now stay dry.
- Realistic Ice Reflections: Improved how ice interacts with light. It now properly reflects both the sky and the ground beneath it, providing a much more natural look rather than a flat, disappearing sheen.
-
Note: As this is an alpha release, many of these optimizations are now enabled by default to test their stability in real-world scenarios. All can be toggled back in the settings menu.
0.10.0-alpha.2
Full Changelog: 0.10.0-alpha...0.10.0-alpha.2
The second alpha, published to be reported against rather than because it is
finished. Everything below was flown on one machine, on Linux, with an NVIDIA
card, and nowhere else. Windows and AMD are untried in this build.
If you are on the first alpha, this one will tell you about itself. That did
not work before: a build on the way to a version was asking for the latest
finished release, which by definition is never another alpha.
The pass that was not about creatures
renderEntities reads as a loop over creatures and is not one. It walks every
section on screen — some 17 700 at thirty-two chunks, of which about 2 700 hold
any blocks at all — and asks the world which chunk each one belongs to before
finding out whether anything is standing in it. Held to a fixed scene of five
drawn creatures it costs 0.07 ms a frame at eight chunks and 1.10 at
thirty-two, and the half of it that draws block entities grows the same way
with none drawn at all.
So the loop is turned inside out: sixty entities each name the section they are
filed in, and the visibility search answers in one array read whether that
section is on screen. The same creatures are drawn, in the same order.
| At 32 chunks, flying | Before | After |
|---|---|---|
renderEntities |
1.12 ms/frame | 0.01 ms/frame |
| Frame rate along the route | 305–354 | 512–513 |
| Worst frame on the route | 225 | 353 |
At 24 chunks it gains one per cent and at 8 nothing at all, which is the same
statement from the other side: below thirty-two the frame is not waiting on that
thread.
A chunk vertex in 16 bytes instead of 28
Off by default, under Advanced → Pack Chunk Vertices, effective on the next
start.
The terrain pass was measured against render distance and against window size,
and the two answers name what it waits for: 0.048 ms per million vertices, and
no change at all between a small window and a very large one. Nine million
vertices at twenty-eight bytes is 252 MB of vertex reading a frame.
The position keeps a 2048th of a block — 128 times finer than one pixel of a
block texture, on a lattice neighbouring chunks share exactly. The light is
exact. The colour, which carries the shading in corners, is untouched.
- the card's terrain time: 0.49 ms → 0.42 ms
- the fixed route: 521 → 547 frames a second
- this mod's copy of the world: 428 MiB of video memory → 240
The memory is the larger half of that, and it is what decides whether a long
render distance fits at all. Ray tracing works with it.
Smaller things
- The layer filter gets a short list too (Optimisation → Short Layer Filter
List, off by default). It removes real work — 0.72 ms a frame down to 0.45 —
and buys no frames at all on the machine it was measured on, because after the
entity passes were shortened the frame stopped waiting on that thread. The
setting says exactly that rather than leaving it to be discovered. - The frame is now timed on the card as well as on the thread, by name,
using the phases the game already declares for its own profiler.
What this alpha still does not know
It has not been run on Windows, on an AMD card, or on a heavily modded pack.
Faults go to the issue tracker, and logs/latest.log is worth more than a
description of what happened.
You also need MixinBooter
10.7 or newer. No launcher installs it for you.
0.10.0-alpha
An alpha. It is published to be reported against rather than because it is finished.
It has not been run on Windows and not on an AMD card, and the newest of what is listed
below has been looked at on one machine only. Everything here works on the machine it was
built on; that is the whole of what is known. If you are looking for the build to play on,
that is still 0.9.0.
Installing
Drop vulkanmod112-0.10.0-alpha.jar into mods. You also need
MixinBooter 10.7 or newer beside
it — no launcher installs it for you, and without it the game stops during coremod discovery.
If Vulkan is missing, the driver is old, or the two graphics cards in a laptop disagree, the
game renders the way it always did and the log says why.
What is new since 0.9.0
- Creatures shade their own faces against the sun, and the shimmer of enchanted armour is drawn.
- A fog distance of your own, since vanilla ties the haze to the render distance.
- Only the animated textures something on screen is using are uploaded — experimental, off by
default, and it needs the chunks in view rebuilt with F3+A before it saves anything. - The class patches split into eight groups that can be switched off, and a group whose patch
fails is quarantined so the next launch starts without it. - The mod says what it cannot do: when a newer build exists, when a setting is switched on and
another one is holding it still, and where the frame actually went. - Fixed, among others: the field of dots in the sun's reflection on water; a wet floor coming out
brighter than a dry one; three sun-driven shadows arriving at three different sunrises and then
multiplying; creatures drawn see-through, missing their hurt flash, or black on the far side in
daylight; and a crash in a pack from a patch that insisted on finding something another mod had
already done.
CHANGELOG.md has the whole list with the reason behind each line.
Reporting
The issue tracker is the point of this
build. logs/latest.log is worth more than a description of what happened — it names the card,
the driver, the loader and every setting this mod was running with. A screenshot helps for
anything about the picture.
If the game will not start, deleting config/vulkanmod112-patches.cfg turns every class patch
back on, and Settings → Advanced → Diagnostics → Class Patches switches them off one group at a
time.
Full Changelog: 0.9.0...0.10.0-alpha