PathMax

A voxel path traced shaderpack for Iris.

PathMax lights the world by tracing rays through a voxel copy of it that is rebuilt every frame. A torch lights the room from the direction it actually sits in and casts a real shadow. Colour bleeds off the block it bounced from. A lava lake lights the ceiling above it, and nothing in the Nether is lit by a sun, because there isn't one.

Reflections are screen-space, so what you see in water is the finished frame — global illumination, emission, fog and all — rather than a simplified copy of the world re-lit by an approximation.

What's in it

Lighting

Path traced global illumination, denoised in screen space
Block lights sampled straight out of the voxel grid with a shadow ray each, so two lamps in one room are two lamps and not one average
Sun visibility read from the shadow map at every bounce — finer than the grid and eight times cheaper than a second march
Coloured light through stained glass: on the floor, in the air, and carried by the bounce, so a rose window paints the whole room
Emissive surfaces driven by the texture rather than a flat per-block value

Atmosphere

Volumetric light, with an optional second pass lit by lamps instead of the sun
Volumetric clouds that also show up in reflections
Light pollution — a town over the hill, its glow standing on the horizon and drowning the faintest stars first
Height-based aerial perspective tuned against real visual-range figures
Procedural stars, fixed size on screen

Water

Screen-space reflections with roughness, refraction, foam and caustics
Optional volumetrics above and below the surface, with real absorption over the real path length
Optional waves and surface detail

Materials

labPBR, with an integrated fallback for packs that ship no specular map
Subsurface scattering for foliage, driven by shadow-map thickness
Optional parallax occlusion mapping
Entities voxelised, so mobs cast traced shadows and appear in reflections

Dimensions

The Nether and the End are rewritten rather than tinted: no phantom sun, no blue gradient on the underside of the roof, ambient arriving from the floor where the lava is
End portals and obsidian get their own treatment

Post

AgX tonemapping by default, with ACES and four others available
Auto exposure, bloom, optional TAA

Requirements


Loader	Iris only. OptiFine will not load this pack
Minecraft	1.20.1 – 26.2
GPU	OpenGL 4.6, compatibility profile
macOS	Not supported — caps at OpenGL 4.1

Block shape and material classification is current to 1.21.4. Blocks added after that still render, they just don't get the special treatment.

Settings

Seventeen screens, every option documented in the tooltip — not one-liners, but what the setting does, what it costs, and why the default is where it is.

Five profiles from Potato to Ultra. They are one ladder, not five unrelated presets: the base already sits on the floor of ray rate, bounces and step count, so the cheap end saves by giving up volumetrics, clouds and reach, and the expensive end spends on rays first.

The pack ships with a hand-tuned configuration rather than a profile — a night-heavy look with heavy light pollution and strong volumetrics. Pick Balanced for the reference settings.

PathMax

A voxel path traced shaderpack for Iris.

Reflections are screen-space, so what you see in water is the finished frame — global illumination, emission, fog and all — rather than a simplified copy of the world re-lit by an approximation.

What's in it

Lighting

Path traced global illumination, denoised in screen space
Block lights sampled straight out of the voxel grid with a shadow ray each, so two lamps in one room are two lamps and not one average
Sun visibility read from the shadow map at every bounce — finer than the grid and eight times cheaper than a second march
Coloured light through stained glass: on the floor, in the air, and carried by the bounce, so a rose window paints the whole room
Emissive surfaces driven by the texture rather than a flat per-block value

Atmosphere

Volumetric light, with an optional second pass lit by lamps instead of the sun
Volumetric clouds that also show up in reflections
Light pollution — a town over the hill, its glow standing on the horizon and drowning the faintest stars first
Height-based aerial perspective tuned against real visual-range figures
Procedural stars, fixed size on screen

Water

Screen-space reflections with roughness, refraction, foam and caustics
Optional volumetrics above and below the surface, with real absorption over the real path length
Optional waves and surface detail

Materials

labPBR, with an integrated fallback for packs that ship no specular map
Subsurface scattering for foliage, driven by shadow-map thickness
Optional parallax occlusion mapping
Entities voxelised, so mobs cast traced shadows and appear in reflections

Dimensions

The Nether and the End are rewritten rather than tinted: no phantom sun, no blue gradient on the underside of the roof, ambient arriving from the floor where the lava is
End portals and obsidian get their own treatment

Post

AgX tonemapping by default, with ACES and four others available
Auto exposure, bloom, optional TAA

Requirements


Loader	Iris only. OptiFine will not load this pack
Minecraft	1.20.1 – 26.2
GPU	OpenGL 4.6, compatibility profile
macOS	Not supported — caps at OpenGL 4.1

Block shape and material classification is current to 1.21.4. Blocks added after that still render, they just don't get the special treatment.

Settings

Seventeen screens, every option documented in the tooltip — not one-liners, but what the setting does, what it costs, and why the default is where it is.

The pack ships with a hand-tuned configuration rather than a profile — a night-heavy look with heavy light pollution and strong volumetrics. Pick Balanced for the reference settings.

PathMax

Compatibility

Supported Loaders

Game Versions

PathMax

What's in it

Requirements

Settings

Gallery

PathMax

What's in it

Requirements

Settings