Fornax
Fornax fixes a problem with high-resolution resource packs, and uses Vulkan. A 256x+ LabPBR pack can have three textures for every block; this unblocks those with 512x regression testing happening now as well.
Автор: Icehunter2430обновлён 25 сент. 2026 г.
Оптимизация
Описание
Fornax
A Vulkan rendering engine for Minecraft, built as a companion to Sodium. Fornax fixes a problem with high-resolution resource packs.
A 256x LabPBR pack can have three textures for every block:
- Colour
- Normal
- Specular
Minecraft normally puts all three into the same atlas. At higher resolutions, the atlas can exceed the hardware limit and the resource pack fails to load.
Fornax stores normal and specular maps in separate atlases. They no longer take space in the main block atlas.
This allows 256x packs to load with their colour, normal, and specular maps intact on low-end devices.
Fornax also provides shaderpack (when paired with the appropriate pack/GLSL) features.
Available Features:
- Deferred rendering
- Declarative render graphs
- LabPBR materials
- Screen-space ambient occlusion
- Screen-space reflections
- Temporal anti-aliasing
- Supersampling
- Configurable shaderpack settings
- Experimental MetalFX frame generation on Apple Silicon
- *macOS on Apple Silicon is currently the only tested platform.
Before installing
- Fornax does not include a shaderpack.
- No shaderpacks have been published yet (TBD and nearly finished for public testing)
- Installing Fornax by itself does not change Minecraft’s visuals. Shaders are disabled until you install and select a compatible Fornax shaderpack.
Fornax shaderpacks use their own format:
- TOML configuration
- GLSL shaders
- Not compatible with shaderpacks made for other loaders
See the pack format documentation. PACK-FORMAT
Requirements
- Minecraft 26.2
- Fabric Loader 0.19.2 or newer
- Sodium 0.9.1 or 0.9.2
- Java 25 or newer
- --enable-native-access=ALL-UNNAMED in your launcher’s JVM arguments
Known limitations
- 256x packs work.
- 512x packs do not work yet (but did yesterday >.>)
- Frame generation is experimental.
- Frame generation requires vsync and adds roughly one frame of latency.
- Very dark surfaces may show occasional bright pixels.
- The bright-pixel issue is still being investigated.
- Only Apple Silicon Macs have been tested so far.
Development
Fornax was built by one person over roughly two months, with AI used to assist with code and assets.
Any AI generated code was reviewed, modified, or rejected as needed through thorough testing and validation.
The architecture, design decisions, tuning, and acceptance tests were done and reviewed by the developer. Generated code was reviewed, modified, or rejected as needed.
Последние версии
Все версии →release
Fornax 0.5.0+mc26.2
0.5.0+mc26.225 сент. 2026 г.151Minecraft: 26.2fabric
Что нового
### Ray Tracing on Metal
- Hardware ray traced sun and moon shadows for terrain on Mac
- Named ray tiers a pack can read, and a ray_query pass type for a pack's own rays
- Rays carry a block's tint and light in the hit record
- Tracing runs only when something reads the result, with GPU timing on each phase
### Camera
- Aperture jitter for true depth-of-field stills: parked, the projection looks through a different point of a real lens each frame while the focused subject stays pixel-fixed
- Focus comes from a 512-block look along the view, and reported jitter is only what was applied, which also fixes a swim under TAAU and frame generation
### Voxel Light
- Entity occluders and exact partial block shapes
- Block models off the 1/16 grid read correctly
- Mesh edits run on their own worker instead of Sodium's meshing thread
- blocks.toml can turn a block off as a light source
### Graph and Speed
- Waits only for the compute work that blocks the next pass
- Sampler choice, parsed gates and fixed name lists are worked out once, not every frame
- A compute pass can read this frame's images in draw order
### Tools
- Deploy verifies the jar and reconciles the launcher index
- Frame profile dump on a key, with capture tools and GPU timing on the mesh trace
release
Fornax 0.4.0+mc26.2
0.4.0+mc26.29 сент. 2026 г.69Minecraft: 26.2fabric
Что нового
# 0.4.0
## Voxels
- Face data now tracks its source per face, not per cell (fixes stale light/face data on refresh)
- Fixed vertex grid cracks at section edges
- Batch uploads reuse one buffer and fence instead of allocating each time (faster)
- Face data shrunk from 18,432 to 16,128 bytes per slot
- Model and sprite reads split from GPU upload lifetime
- Chunks now queue a harvest on arrival, so missed sections fill in without waiting on camera move
## Water
- Water prepass now draws for every water tier, not just reflection mode
- Prepass targets no longer depend on the draw gate
- Fixed cloud shadows and fluid column height scans
## World data for packs
- Packs can read the world's day count and day fraction
- Day values crossfade over real time instead of cutting at the day boundary
- Wider climate data: temperature, downfall, biome tags
- Nether fog options added
- End portal and gateway get their own slot
- Glass refraction strength exposed to terrain
## Graph engine
- Compute results reuse across frames when inputs match
- Independent passes can overlap instead of waiting in strict order
- New consolidate pass for reading several targets through one array texture
- Passes can be gated per dimension
- 3D volume textures supported for compute passes
## Debug and profiling
- GPU/CPU timings tagged by frame ID
- Profiler overlay can filter by pass, counter, or slowest only
- Can dump one frame's raw pass inputs/outputs
## Fixes
- Deferred slot reporting fixed for forward and particle paths
- Linear-filter check no longer looks at compute-only images
- Tests now pin field order in u_Globals, not just total size
## Docs
- Fixed stale mixin and test counts in AGENTS.md
- Fixed u_Globals byte size in ARCHITECTURE.md
**Full Changelog**: https://github.com/Icehunter/fornax/compare/v0.3.0...v0.4.0
release
Fornax 0.3.0+mc26.2
0.3.0+mc26.226 авг. 2026 г.6Minecraft: 26.2fabric
Что нового
- feat: add Always mode for frame generation, fix Metal HUD toggle (3803835)
- fix: four stale/misattributed doc comments and a diagnostic misattribution (05fc6ec)
- fix: shadow texel-snap runs its absolute-position transform in double (57dc347)
- fix: cross-queue wait-stage matching misses .history readers and a hardcoded stage (46a5209)
- docs: comments state the current reason, never the incident history (2192497)
- chore: strip narrative/incident-history language from code comments (fa38c28)
- fix: PackReload's resource-reload future is missing its exceptionally handler (b01e075)
- fix: check fence-wait results, guard storage-buffer bind, add COPY wait-stage (b9111b2)
- fix: defer atlas rebuild past real render-loop submits, close remaining VRAM/thread gaps (9afee18)
- fix: hoist-and-free GPU builders, MetalFX device-loss handling, sidecar VRAM budget (bf1ce8d)
- fix: catch per-frame resolve failures in COPY/MIPCHAIN dispatch (bbf6aa1)
- fix: NoiseTexture assigns texture/view atomically (698c44a)
- fix: honest overflow-page VRAM accounting, real device VRAM query (68324db)
- fix: deactivate frame generation on pack teardown (b03c53f)
- fix: roll GraphRunner back to inactive on a failed pack switch (db90cea)
- fix: recognize FULLSCREEN/PARTICLES readers of surfaceFluidClipmap and waterActors (1a777cb)
- fix: free partially-created Vulkan handles on compute pipeline build failure (144f66e)
- fix: persist sunPathRotation changes on settings save (46dcc12)
- Create FUNDING.yml (e0509e6)
**Full Changelog**: https://github.com/Icehunter/fornax/compare/v0.2.0...v0.3.0
beta
Fornax 0.2.0+mc26.2
0.2.0+mc26.223 авг. 2026 г.7Minecraft: 26.2fabric
Что нового
What Changed:
- page the block atlas automatically instead of behind a flag
- the flag was off by default, so a 512x pack just failed to load with "try a lower resolution resourcepack" and nothing pointing at the switch.
- paging only ever runs when the alternative is that failure, so there was nothing for a setting to choose.
- drop labPBR sidecars from every atlas, not just blocks.
- entity and banner atlases were carrying 786 MB of maps nothing samples.
- size the sprite-bounds grid to the pack.
- a coarse grid forces a coarse placement pitch and wastes most of an overflow page. packs read it through fornax_spriteGridCell now instead of hardcoding the number.
- cap overflow pages by available memory rather than a fixed count, so a pack that will not fit refuses at load instead of swapping the machine.
- log the sprite-bounds grid size when it rebuilds the grid is resized per pack now, and nothing said what it ended up at, so there was no way to tell whether a big pack's grid was released.
**Full Changelog**: https://github.com/Icehunter/fornax/compare/v0.1.0...v0.2.0
beta
Fornax 0.1.0+mc26.2
0.1.0+mc26.223 авг. 2026 г.10Minecraft: 26.2fabric
Что нового
Initial release :)