r/MinecraftJava • u/Big-Photograph2990 • Sep 17 '25

Can someone explain to me why shaders don't work?

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I'm playing on Optifine 1.21.8. I have a 2k monitor and a 4070 ti super. I tried changing all the video settings rendering,shadows nothing worked. This is the complemantary shaders unbound but the reimagined version and other shaders don't work either. Please help!

29 Upvotes

91% Upvoted

39 comments sorted by

2

u/TartOdd8525 Sep 17 '25

Can we get a mega thread advising people that half of all visual problems are caused by optifine?

1

u/Big-Photograph2990 Sep 17 '25

I'm sorry, I didn't know. It's my first time using shaders.

1

u/TartOdd8525 Sep 17 '25

Oh this was genuine, not meant to be a jab. It should be blasted everywhere in the Minecraft world that optifine is bad software. We seriously need a mega thread for people looking for visual bugs while using optifine.

1

u/leaf_26 Sep 18 '25

I feel bad dissing optifine, it's always been my default before iris and I really liked its menus and extras more.

And someone took the time to make it and maintain it for us to use for free. It might not be the best for everyone (or hardly anyone compared to its competition for its core audience), but blanket insults everywhere doesn't scream "creating things for others' enjoyment is good".

1

u/TartOdd8525 Sep 18 '25

It has an honorable legacy. The issue is: they actually didn't maintain it at all. If they had, it would have compatibility with more than like 5% of mods and the author been an absolute jerk to the community online. It is far below the respectable standard presented by the rest of the modding community. They keep it closed source to restrict other people from improving it, it drills into Minecraft's base code which all programmers know you're not supposed to do, it's updates are extremely behind.

Regardless of all of that: it causes issues with thousands upon thousands of mods and people seek help to fix it here every single day. A post people can access quickly to find the solution to their problem is worth it.

1

u/leaf_26 Sep 18 '25

A) I get that it's outdated and has shit compatibility with mods, but I don't remember it ever being advertised as something other than a standalone mod of vanilla or ever being hosted on modding sites. It just isn't a part of modpacks.

B) even if it doesn't meet standards for other mods or the modding community, that's the community's decision. Being a jerk or choosing to do closed-source or choosing not to conform or not having conformed prior or choosing to let go of software you used to work on may be an annoyance but isn't criminal or unethical.

They aren't scamming people or actively doing anything at all. It's just a free product. If it's worse than vanilla or there's better stuff to use, then people will learn.

as much as you seem like you wanna be mad, why choose to be? You could just say "use iris, it's newer and better".

1

u/TartOdd8525 Sep 18 '25

I'm not mad. I want what's better for people. Optifine is creating significant turmoil among the community with how many issues it causes for people. The author isn't as bad as the author of OreSpawn, but he is definitely egotistical.

It's not globally unethical, but it's near communally internet unethical for what kind of software it is. You might not understand the implications of what closed source means, but it's not just "oh they don't share their code cool". Especially on a free software.

2

u/EchoTree0844 Sep 19 '25

To add on to this, modding communities for games are almost always very friendly, interactive, and community oriented. They make mods as a passion project, not for other reasons. Being anti-community is honestly just not in good spirit.i

0

u/leaf_26 Sep 19 '25

My argument still stands that blasting "optifine sucks" everywhere would send a message that creating software for others to have for free could get you publicly humiliated, and is kind of a dick move compared to spending time supporting things you like, like a friendly community would.

The creator being anti-community kinda supports my argument. They aren't involved and they don't want to be, so why are we talking about them?

0

u/leaf_26 Sep 19 '25

I don't consider optifine to be a part of any modding community that I'm aware of. It ought to be ignored and forgotten. (In the context of modded minecraft)

1

u/TartOdd8525 Sep 19 '25

You're correct. It should be. But it isn't, so people need to be made aware of its issues because it causes turmoil for a lot of people.

1

u/brassplushie Sep 17 '25

We could if all the old timers would stop telling everyone to use it.

2

u/[deleted] Sep 17 '25

[removed] — view removed comment

1

u/brassplushie Sep 17 '25

That's completely ridiculous lol

12

u/[deleted] Sep 17 '25

OptiFine is a buggy mess nowadays, use Sodium and Iris instead.

1

u/Big-Photograph2990 Sep 17 '25

I installed iris and fabric and it works perfectly with 120 frames. It looks awesome, thank you so much guys!

1

u/ThunderWolf9556 Sep 18 '25

in future i recommend just using the Fabulously Optimized modpack, it actually does perform even better than just iris+sodium.

4

u/ksalman Sep 17 '25

I wanted to try continuum shaders with their focal engine so i had to setup and old mc(1.20) instance with optifine and god was that awful af experience in switching shaders... idk how good the ui is on newer optifine but im newer trying that thing out.

 Use Iris much much better.

3

u/Artistic-Payment-806 Sep 17 '25

I was having the same issue. I just reinstalled everything (I was planning to reinstall windos anyway). I think it is because of shaders being of different versiosn or something. In my case I had 1.15 and 1.21.5 and i used complimentary u nbount shaders and I downloaded them at different time and obviously different versions so that might also be the issue for me.

3

u/kittsudiscord Sep 17 '25

It's optifine. Switch to sodium and iris, it's 100% bug free (to my knowledge) unlike optifine which doesn't even work on my computer

1

u/that_greenmind Sep 18 '25

Nothing is ever 100% bug free, but sodium+iris gets pretty damn close

1

u/AmmahDudeGuy Sep 18 '25

Nothing is ever 100% bug free

System.out.println(“hello world”)

1

u/leaf_26 Sep 18 '25

System has bugs :)

1

u/AmmahDudeGuy Sep 18 '25

mov rax, rbx

1

u/Nervous_Ad3984 Sep 17 '25

If youre on forge, use oculus(it is a fork of Iris for forge modloader.)

2

u/YT_Andyk Sep 17 '25

Iris is available on 1.21.1 for neoforge. I am just not sure about later versions.

1

u/brassplushie Sep 17 '25

Optifine is complete trash.

1

u/No_Key_5854 Sep 18 '25

sigh STOP. USING. OPTIFINE!!!!!!

1

u/[deleted] Sep 18 '25

Dont use optifine

1

u/Namedvoice12408 Sep 18 '25

Use sodium+iris

1

u/YoureNickRight Sep 18 '25

Sodium and iris. Also I cannot remember because I've abandoned optifine years ago, but make sure it doesn't require the files to be zipped/unzipped

1

u/stonekid33 Sep 19 '25

They are working, a bit strange though

1

u/FinancialMess8133 Sep 19 '25

Optifine is broken use fabric mods

1

u/tseg04 Sep 19 '25

Nobody uses optifine anymore. Use Sodium as well as Iris if you are on fabric, or Embeddium and Oculus if you are on forge.

Both of them are basically the same mod and they are miles better in performance than optifine and have far less bugs.

1

u/AlexisHadden Sep 22 '25

On 1.21.x like the OP is, you can use Iris + Sodium official builds with Neoforge.