Iris was created to fill a void that I saw in the Minecraft customization and graphical enhancement community: the lack of an open-source shaders mod that would let me load my favorite shader packs on modern versions of the game, while retaining performance and compatibility with modpacks. OptiFine, the current dominant mod for loading shader packs, has restrictive licensing that firmly stands in the way of any sort of tinkering, and is fairly notorious for having compatibility issues with the mods that I like. It's also mutually incompatible with Sodium, the best rendering optimization mod in existence by a large margin. ShadersMod was never updated past 1.12, and it lacks support for many of the many modern popular shaderpacks. So I created Iris, to try and solve these issues, and also address many other longstanding issues with shader packs.

I first and foremost develop Iris to meet my own needs of a performance-oriented shaders mod with good compatibility and potential for tinkering. Iris when paired with Sodium delivers great performance on my machine, finally making it fully possible for me to actually play with shaders instead of just periodically switching them on to take pretty screenshots, then switching them off once I get tired of frame drops. Of course, as it turns out, I'm far from the only person who benefits from the development of Iris, which is why I've decided to release it to the public as an open-source mod.

Iris has a public stable release for 1.18.2, 1.19.2, and 1.19.3, as well as a public beta for snapshots. Iris is still in heavy development and gets new improvements very often, and is progressing very rapidly!