PrimeCinematic

New

• Sky: deeper daytime blue, warm-to-violet sunsets, a real round sun with a soft corona, and a moon that follows its phases.
• Clouds: the pack's own soft, sunlit clouds that change from day to day and close in when it rains (Atmosphere > Clouds: Off / Vanilla / Fast / Fancy).
• Water: depth-based colour, refraction through the ripples, moving caustics on sunlit lake beds, and reflections of the trees and hills around it (Cinematic and up).
• Foliage glow: leaves and grass light up when the sun is behind them.
• Temporal anti-aliasing (TAA) with a sharpening slider.
• Auto exposure: caves open up gently, snow doesn't blow out.
• Border fog at the edge of render distance, readable nights and softer rain.
• The Nether, the End and modded dimensions get their own fog colour and distance.
• New Low preset.

Faster

• Entities cast shadows only within a quarter of the shadow distance, so the shadow pass does half the CPU work.
• The default Balanced preset runs about 16% more FPS than 1.x Balanced at 1080p in our tests (same GPU time at 4K).

Fixed

• Stars near the horizon no longer stretch into streaks.
• The Nether no longer shows a bright pink wall beyond the terrain.
• The sun's glint on water is a tight sparkle instead of a white sheet.
• The red hit flash and the creeper's white flash show again.
• Looking up underwater shows the sky through the surface instead of flat blue.
• Water in the End no longer reflects the Overworld sky.
• Contrast below 1.0 now works.

Note for 26.3: Iris does not run on the experimental Vulkan renderer. Set Video Settings > Graphics API to "Default" or "Prefer OpenGL" and restart.