10 Best Minecraft Shaders for Low-End PCs

If you are one of the low-end PC gamers and still want to experience Minecraft with shaders, you have arrived at the perfect place. We have collected some of the best shaders for low-end PCs that can deliver improved graphics while maintaining your FPS. You’ll only need to install Optifine in Minecraft to run them. Once you do that, it is time to dive in and check out some of the best FPS-friendly Minecraft shaders!

1. Cyanide Shaders

Cyanide is one of the simplest shader packs for Minecraft users with low-end PCs. Unless you are a regular player, you might not even notice the differences it brings to the game. It removes unnecessary animations from the game and makes most of the textures vibrant and more contrasting. Such changes are quite advantageous on Minecraft PvP servers and mini-games.

In terms of features, it provides tone mapping to smoothen textures, general bloom effect, and very basic lighting details. The world looks mystical during sunset and sunrise and stays overtly lit during the rest of the day. You can explore all of the Minecraft biomes without witnessing anything out of place in the overworld, Nether, and End dimensions.

2. Nostalgia Shader

Nostalgia Shaders is for all the crafters who are longing for a glimpse of the early days of Minecraft. This will be a perfect throwback and is designed to replicate the same style back in those days. With this pack you can get a visual upgrade with soft shadows and volumetric fog.

Apart from that, you get features like anti-aliasing, optional screening path tracing, and customizable lens effect. So, if you want the cozy retro Minecraft feel along with a modern polish, install this Nostalgia shader right now and bring your friends as well.

3. Sildur’s Basic Shaders

Sildrur’s basic shaders is a pretty lightweight and fast Minecraft shader pack, which is perfect for a low-end PC. It provides a yellowish tint to the environment, thus making it seem warmer. It also brightens the darker spots fairly well, making contrast less obvious. Thanks to various customizations, this shader pack can be further modified to suit your needs.

It supports the following options: antialiasing, sharpening, ambient occlusion, celshading, color boost, color filter, custom emissive lightmaps, custom sun/moon angle, tone mapping, depth of field, motion blur, bump and parallax mapping, as well as wavy features.

During the night, besides the fact that every block seems a bit orange, the dark spots are not as dark in vanilla. Particles don’t stand out too much, and the world is generally very pleasant to look at.

4. Tea Shaders

Unlike the previous shader pack, Tea shaders don’t focus on bumping the brightness, nor adding too much tint to the existing textures, but they make the world clearer and more atmospheric. The fog is much more prominent shadows are not as dark as in the vanilla game. The water is darker and less transparent.

The current features include waving grass, leaves, and water, customizable watercolor with three settings for texture and biome effects, custom swamp biome effect, customizable fog, Nether heat refraction effect, and so many more.

Tea shaders make the world significantly darker during the night, which can make spotting the hostile mobs a bit more difficult. Moreover, due to the pitch black night sky, the stars stand out a lot, which makes for some pretty breathtaking nighttime adventures.

5. DrDestens MCShaders

The DrDestens MCShaders provide simple but fairly beautiful features. First of all, the water has changed quite drastically. It becomes reflective and more realistic. Moreover, because of the “water fog”, it also seems darker and it’s not possible to see too deep, which would be scary if you played with mods that add underwater monsters.

The whole world seems a lot brighter, and contrast is not emphasized. The fog isn’t as important as in the Tea Shaders but does play a greater role than in the vanilla game. Some of the many features DrDestens MCShaders provide are anti-aliasing, physically based rendering, various water effects, bloom, and more.

The nighttime with these shaders looks nothing less than gorgeous. The water is a lot darker, but the surface is not. The light emitted from light source blocks is more vibrant, which creates distinctive contrast points. The sky is not pitch black, but stars still manage to catch your eye so easily. There is a lot to this shader pack than meets the eye at first, so check it out if you’re interested.

6. Spooklementary

If you’re looking for some chilling horror fun in Minecraft with your friends, Spooklementary shaders is the one you must try right now. With this mod, the visuals of the game get completely desaturated and an eerie aesthetic covers up the environment.

Apart from these, your surrounding is filled with dense fog and are a lot darker than the vanilla experience. If you stay long enough, you might even experience an ominous blood moon appear in the sky.

Don’t get scared if you suddenly notice some rare and unsettling experiences like flickering lights, leaves vanishing randomly, static noises, and your screen shaking, because all of these are a part of the shader’s features. So, bring your friends and install this shader in your world.

7. MakeUp – Ultra Fast 

MakeUp – Ultra Fast shaders are my first choice whenever I can’t decide which shader to use within the game. It provides good in-game performance and significant graphical upgrades. You can also expect anti-aliasing, ambient occlusion, motion blur, volumetric sky, waving plants, realistic reflections, and more in this shader pack.

The best part about this shader pack isn’t the features provided here, but instead, it’s the ability to turn them off as per our preference. You get to choose which part of your game should stay vanilla and which aspect should look realistic. Such space for experimentation allows you to find the settings that look good and also work well according to your PC’s limits.

Finally, when it comes to dark areas, this shader can turn your cave exploration into nightmares due to extremely low brightness. You can reduce the darkness slightly in the shader’s settings, but we’d suggest you carry a lot of torches anyway.

8. Photon Shaders

Transforming your blocky Minecraft world into a cinematic experience can be made possible using the Photon Shaders. It comes with some of the richest features and upgrades to the usual vanilla graphics including the complete overhaul of the sky and bringing a fabulous light shadow interplay.

Not just that, each day in the world will feel different once you install this shader for Minecraft due to the volumetric clouds and a responsive atmospheric system. Furthermore, if you enhance the graphics by turning on the Ultra profile in Iris, it will unlock colored lighting effects.

Choose features of the usual Minecraft blocky clouds or a glowing night sky, a hard ocean surface, or a shimmering water body; the choice is yours. Toggle on the motion blur in this shader to bring more depth to your world.

9. Complimentary Shaders – Reimagined

Complimentary Shaders Reimagined is for those crafters who want to introduce stunning visuals to their Minecraft world while preserving the vanilla style at the same time. Notice that, unlike the original Complimentary shaders that completely change the clouds, rivers, trees, and leaves, the Reimagined version keeps them blocky but somewhat feels realistic as well.

So, whether you have a high-performance setup or a low-end PC, this shader will work on most of them. Moreover, you can personalize the settings, ranging from Potato low graphics to ultra-high settings, depending on your PC’s performance.

With realistic lighting, immersive visuals, along a realistic aesthetic, this Minecraft shader offers a range of customizations to choose from. Now, you can keep your world as a naturally generated one, or feel like a fantasy world with the Complimentary Reimagined shaders.

10. BSL Shaders

BSL shaders for Minecraft blend reality with the vibrant graphics, introducing warm lighting, life-like shadows, and beautiful reflections. One of the main highlights in this shader is the realistic water, which blends quite naturally with Minecraft’s blocky world.

Even with all these enhanced visuals, you won’t face any performance issues on low-end setups as well. So, no need for high-tech graphics cards that include RTX and whatnot because BSL shaders have the power to make the world feel a lot more alive than ever.

How to Install Minecraft Shaders

Installing the shaders for Minecraft and running them in-game is quite easy, and all you need is a mod that improves the performance of the game, like Optifine or Iris. The only thing you must keep in mind is to check the version of the mod you’re installing to make sure it’s the same as the shader you want to use. Now, you can follow the given steps to install the shader in Minecraft:

• Click on any one of our links for the Shaders and download the zip file from the redirected page.
• Check your downloads folder to ensure the zip file has been downloaded properly.
• Now start the Minecraft version that has the performance mod installed.
• Create a new world or launch a previously made one.
• Go to the pause menu by pressing the Escape key and click on the Options button.
• Click on Video Settings, and next click on the Shaders button.
• Click on the Shaders Folder button to open it.
• Now drag and drop the shaders zip file from your Downloads folder to this location and close the window.
• Now select the shaders file in the Minecraft window, wait for a few seconds for the game to load and finally go back. This will change the visuals of your Minecraft world.

That completes the list of top Minecraft shaders that you can install to make your world feel more life-like. So, which is your favorite shader for Minecraft apart from the ones named above? Let us know in the comments below, and we will try to add more to this list.