Radiante

is a client-side mod that brings real-time hardware ray tracing to Minecraft 26.3, running natively on the game’s own Vulkan renderer — no second renderer, no second window, no OpenGL bridge. Available for Fabric, NeoForge and Forge.

Alpha software. Radiante is an early, work-in-progress fork. Things will change between versions. Back up your worlds and configs before installing.

What makes Radiante different

Built on 26.3’s native Vulkan, not a second renderer bolted on

• No dual-renderer bridge – Minecraft 26.3 ships its own Vulkan backend (com.mojang.renderpearl); Radiante shares that same device and swapchain instead of running a separate OpenGL↔Vulkan translation layer like older ray tracing mods had to.
• Fewer moving parts – one Vulkan instance, one device, one frame timeline.
• Multiloader – one codebase, native builds for Fabric, NeoForge and Forge.
• Built to be maintainable – designed so future Minecraft versions can be ported without a rewrite.

Features

Lighting

• Path-traced direct light, soft shadows and global illumination.
• Emissive blocks light their surroundings – torches, lava, glowstone, redstone, magma, nether portals, beacons, end portal frames (with eye).
• Held light sources – a torch, lantern or lava bucket in your hand lights the world from where you actually hold it, with its own brightness slider.
• Burning mobs, glowing eyes, glow item frames, end crystals, lightning and beacon beams all cast real light.
• Separate brightness controls for day, night, placed light sources and held lights.
• Optional pixelated lighting.

Sky & atmosphere

• Physically based sky, sun, moon and atmospheric scattering.
• Volumetric fog and light shafts, per-biome fog and haze.

Water & materials

• Ray-traced reflections and refraction, realistic water surface.
• LabPBR support (_s / _n maps) for blocks, entities and held items – use a PBR resource pack for the best results.
• Bedrock .mcpack resource packs are detected in the pack list, including their fog and water settings.

Upscaling & frame generation

• DLSS Ray Reconstruction (Quality / Balanced / Performance / Ultra Performance).
• DLSS Frame Generation, including multi-frame generation on supported GPUs (Fabric).
• FSR 3 and XeSS upscaling, plus NRD denoising.
• Motion blur and depth of field (toggleable).

Mod compatibility

• Distant Horizons (experimental) – its far terrain is path traced along with the rest of the world: sun shadows, GI, fog and sky all the way to the horizon. DH generation keeps working with ray tracing on.

Ray Tracing ON

Ray Tracing OFF

System Requirements

• Operating System: Windows 10/11 (64-bit) – Linux experimental support.
• Graphics: Vulkan-capable GPU with VK_KHR_ray_tracing_pipeline and VK_KHR_acceleration_structure (NVIDIA RTX 20-series or newer, AMD RX 6000-series or newer, Intel Arc).

Enabling DLSS

DLSS’s own libraries aren’t bundled (NVIDIA’s license doesn’t allow redistributing them). Drop nvngx_dlss.dll and nvngx_dlssd.dll into .minecraft/radiante/dlss/ and restart the game — DLSS will then show up in the Radiante settings screen (F6).

Enabling Frame Generation

Needs an NVIDIA RTX GPU (Fabric only for now). Turn it on in F6, then restart the game once. Changing the multiplier afterward doesn’t need another restart.

Known Issues

• Distant Horizons support is experimental: large LOD areas can occasionally blink when switching detail.
• Frame Generation / Reflex are not available on NeoForge and Forge yet.
• More visible noise when using upscalers other than DLSS.
• Windows only – no Linux support planned for now.

Have you experienced any issues? Reports that include your GPU, driver version, and the latest.log file (with Debug Logging ON) are the most helpful.

Credits

Radiante is a fork of Radiance and its native renderer MCVR, originally by LJIONG and Interstellarss (upstream project). This fork rebuilds the renderer on top of Minecraft 26.3’s own Vulkan backend and keeps the original GPL-3.0 license and credits.

This project uses Vulkan. See vulkan.org for more information.

This project uses NVIDIA’s DLSS. See NVIDIA’s DLSS page and the DLSS GitHub.

This project uses AMD’s FSR 3. See FidelityFX Super Resolution 3.

This project uses Intel’s XeSS. See the XeSS developer guide.

Thanks to the open-source libraries this renderer depends on, including NRD, GLM, STB Image, and Vulkan Memory Allocator.

Dependencies:

• Fabric: Fabric API (required)
• NeoForge / Forge: none

Client-Side – Radiante only changes how the world renders on your machine; it does not need to be installed on a server.

Mod compatibility – Radiante works alongside most mods. What it can’t share a game with is anything that replaces the renderer too: Sodium, Iris and similar rendering mods will conflict. Mods that draw their own custom geometry or effects may render incorrectly or not show up, since Radiante has to understand what a mod submits in order to trace it. If a mod looks wrong, please report it – most of those cases are fixable.

Disclaimer

• This is a community-made, third-party project and is not affiliated with, authorized, sponsored, endorsed by, or otherwise officially connected to Mojang Studios or Microsoft. NOT AN OFFICIAL MINECRAFT SERVICE. NOT APPROVED BY OR ASSOCIATED WITH MOJANG OR MICROSOFT.
• Minecraft and related names, logos, and assets are trademarks and/or intellectual property of Mojang Studios and/or Microsoft.
• This project is also not affiliated with, sponsored by, or endorsed by NVIDIA, AMD, or Intel. NVIDIA/GeForce/RTX/DLSS, AMD/FSR, and Intel/XeSS are trademarks of their respective owners.
• This mod is provided “AS IS”, without warranties, as alpha software. You assume all risks from its use (crashes, visual glitches, incompatibilities with other mods). Back up your worlds and configs before installing.