Mactrics

Mactrics: The Modpack for Apple Silicon

Mactrics is an optimization modpack aimed primarily at Apple Silicon devices. The modpack improves the performance of the game by using the Vulkan API for rendering instead of OpenGL, leveraging the VulkanMod by xCollateral.

How does it work?

Apple Silicon neither supports OpenGL nor Vulkan out of the box. Apple Silicon uses Metal API. However, Vulkan calls can be translated to Metal calls using a translation layer called MoltenVK (Which VulkanMod is bundled with). Vulkan performs better with Metal due to its modern architecure as opposed to OpenGL.

What is the purpose of Mactrics?

Due to VulkanMod using an entirely different renderer than OpenGL, it breaks many existing mods. In such a case, finding compatible mods which work well together to give a performance boost becomes difficult. Mactrics has an assortment of mods from well known developers and the non-compatibility taken care of so you don’t have to get into the hassle of incompatibilites.

Does it support shaders?

Vulkan API is not as prevalent in the Minecraft community right now as OpenGL is. As a result, the shaders are almost always written for OpenGL, rather than Vulkan. Hence, there is no shader support when using Vulkan (at the moment).