DX12mod

DX12 GL — Minecraft on Direct3D 12 (version 3.1)

Makes Minecraft render with DirectX 12 instead of OpenGL, without rewriting the game’s renderer: the mod replaces the OpenGL library LWJGL loads with its own, which tracks OpenGL’s state, translates the shaders and draws with Direct3D 12. That is why it stays compatible with other mods (tested with Embeddium, Oculus and Distant Horizons). It is a single .jar with everything included.

Requirements: Windows 10/11 64-bit · Minecraft Forge 1.20.1 · Java 17 · a Direct3D 12 capable GPU. If your PC does not support it or something fails at startup, the mod touches nothing and Minecraft keeps using plain OpenGL.

Results

Measured on an RTX 2060 (854×480 window). Your results may vary.

The image is the same as with OpenGL. Much of the gain comes from applying OpenGL calls on a separate thread (it uses one more CPU core) and from drawing with D3D12.

What’s included

Renderer

• Direct3D 12 drawing with an asynchronous worker thread (can be turned off).
• Choose which GPU draws (useful on dual-GPU laptops), presentation cap, “frames ahead” (latency vs. smoothness), memory use (Low / Normal / High) and FPS in the window title.
• Save GPU (on by default): does not draw the frames the monitor will not show, nor anything while the window is minimized. The game keeps running the same; in vanilla with unlimited FPS GPU use drops from ~46% to ~29% (and to idle when minimized).
• If the driver resets or the GPU changes, the mod rebuilds everything by itself and the game keeps running.
• MSI Afterburner / RTSS overlays and screenshots (F2) work.

Upscaling and frames

• Resolution upscaling: spatial (built in), AMD FSR 3, Intel XeSS and NVIDIA DLSS (RTX only), with quality presets and sharpness.
• Frame generation (FSR 3 Frame Generation).
• Low latency: NVIDIA Reflex and AMD Anti-Lag 2 (the latter untested on a Radeon).

Shaders

• Shader compatibility (Oculus / Iris): translates the pack’s shaders (GLSL → HLSL) and compiles them in the background with a disk cache; a “Shader compilation” progress bar. Tested with Complementary Reimagined and Spooklementary; other packs may not work.
• Fast compile (DXC): compiles the pack’s shaders with Microsoft’s DXC compiler, in seconds instead of minutes, and recompiles them with FXC in the background (low priority) so the slightly GPU-faster version is used next time. Enabled by default.
• Compute shaders for mods that use them: for example the animated grass of Grassier Grass works with Oculus shaders.
• With shader packs DirectX 12 uses less GPU per frame than OpenGL in my tests (BSL 5.6 vs 6.3 ms; Spooklementary 4.1 vs 4.5 ms on an RTX 2060). Tested with Complementary Reimagined, Spooklementary and BSL.

Distant Horizons

• Works without shaders and with shader packs that support it (tested with Complementary Reimagined): distant terrain, water and DH objects.

In-game settings

• Options → Video Settings → “DirectX 12…” button, or the “DirectX 12” page of Embeddium’s menu. Hovering an option explains what it does and how it affects performance. English and Spanish text.
• Everything is stored in dx12gl/config.properties (can also be edited by hand).

Installation

1. Put the .jar in your Forge 1.20.1 instance’s mods folder.
2. Start the game once, close it and start it again. The first start only disables Forge’s early loading window; from the second start DirectX 12 is used (the window title shows | DX12 NNN FPS).
3. Optional: Embeddium and/or Oculus. To use shader packs turn on “Shader compatibility” in the DirectX 12 settings and restart.

Known limitations

• Windows only, and Forge 1.20.1 only for now.
• The game believes it has OpenGL 3.3: OpenGL 4.x functions (DSA, indirect draws, persistent mapping) are not available. Of compute shaders only what Grassier Grass and similar mods need is implemented (no imageLoad/imageStore or atomics).
• The first time a shader pack is used (or after updating the mod) its shaders are compiled: a few seconds with the “Shader compilation” bar, during which part of the world is not drawn.
• DLSS needs an NVIDIA RTX GPU; XeSS and FSR 3 work on any GPU. Frame generation adds almost one frame of latency and can leave small artifacts.
• The .jar is about 160 MB because it carries the FSR, XeSS, DLSS and DXC libraries (they are copied to dx12gl/ automatically).

Licenses and credits

• DX12 GL: LGPL-3.0-only. Author: thetiranix.

• glslang (BSD-3-Clause and others) and SPIRV-Cross (Apache-2.0): linked inside the mod’s DLL.

• AMD FidelityFX / FSR 3 (MIT license, © Advanced Micro Devices, Inc.), AMD Anti-Lag 2 (MIT).

• Intel XeSS (Intel license, © Intel Corporation).

• NVIDIA DLSS (NVIDIA RTX SDK license, © NVIDIA Corporation) and NVIDIA NVAPI / Reflex (MIT). DLSS is a trademark of NVIDIA.

• Microsoft DirectX Shader Compiler v1.9.2609 (dxcompiler.dll: LLVM/NCSA with exception; dxil.dll: Microsoft software license terms; source: https://github.com/microsoft/DirectXShaderCompiler). Included unmodified, in binary form only, and by using this mod you accept their terms for those two files (among others: use on Windows only).

• The full license texts are inside the .jar, in the licenses/ folder. Windows libraries (d3d12.dll, dxgi.dll, d3dcompiler_47.dll) are not included: they are the system’s own.

• This mod is not an official product of, nor endorsed by, Minecraft, Mojang, Microsoft, NVIDIA, AMD or Intel. Minecraft is a trademark of Mojang AB.

  MADE IT AND OPTIMIZED FOR https://www.curseforge.com/minecraft/modpacks/path-of-ascension modpack
  It can contain some bugs.