Recent stability issues tanked this rating

Iris used to be incredibly dependable in my experience, it was always significantly better than any alternative and had far less weird quirks. As a shader mod iris helped allow people to get the performance of sodium but the shading ability of optifine and similar mods.

Unfortunately, recently I've had so many issues with Iris even optifine looks tempting. On some game versions I've had it crash on launch with no others mods, especially on neoforge. This is not really acceptable for what is supposed to be the gold standard of shading mods and while I might have given this mod 4.5 stars a few months ago I have had to give this scathing review instead.

Part of my issue with this mod may be that it was originally designed for fabric, so I never played it much except in packs where it had already been tested, instead often using oculus. Now Iris is on neoforge I've been using it instead, often with significantly more issues and with worse performance.

TLDR, Iris on neoforge doesn't work that well in my experience. I don't really have any alternative to recommend other than just missing out on shaders for a bit or trying to use the limited vanilla shader options.