🌟 Highlights at a Glance

• 🚀 Vulkan Hardware Ray Tracing: Native acceleration structures (BLAS / TLAS) and inline compute ray queries (VK_KHR_ray_query) for sharp penumbra sun/moon shadows and physical ambient occlusion.
• ⚡ AMD FidelityFX Super Resolution (FSR 2 / 3): Temporal upscaling with subpixel camera jitter, 2D motion vector extraction, and RCAS edge sharpening for fluid high-framerate gameplay at 1440p and 4K.
• 🌈 True 10-Bit scRGB HDR & Wide Color Gamut: Native HDR swapchain presentation with DCI-P3 / BT.2020 gamut expansion and an interactive, AAA-grade in-game display calibration screen.
• 💎 LabPBR & Next-Gen World Shading: GGX microfacet specular reflections, screen-space water reflections (SSR), dynamic underwater caustics, and Parallax Occlusion Mapping (POM) for true 3D surface depth.
• 🌿 Subsurface Scattering (SSS): Sunlight diffuses through leaves, grass, and foliage with natural backlit translucency.
• 💡 Dynamic Radiosity & Colored Block Lights: Emissive blocks cast vibrant colored light, with built-in held dynamic lights.
• 🎨 Shader Pack Ecosystem & Instant Hot-Reload: Load custom shader packs from your .minecraft/shaderpacks/ folder, and press F4 to recompile and hot-reload shaders in milliseconds without restarting the game.
• 🛠️ In-Game Settings GUI: Configure all engine features on the fly by pressing F6 or selecting MCTrace in the NeoForge Mods menu.

📸 Feature Deep-Dive

🚀 Hardware-Accelerated Ray Tracing

MCTrace bypasses legacy screen-space approximations by constructing GPU Top-Level (TLAS) and Bottom-Level (BLAS) Acceleration Structures directly from Minecraft's voxel chunk geometry and dynamic entities:

• True Distance Shadows: Accurate contact hardening, soft penumbra, and cast shadows from blocks and mobs.
• Ray-Traced Ambient Occlusion (RTAO): Rich contact shadows in deep caves, corners, and foliage without screen-edge cutoff.
• SVGF Denoising Pipeline: Spatio-Temporal Variance-Guided Filtering reconstructs noise-free images from minimal sample counts.

⚡ AMD FSR Temporal Upscaling

Render internally at a lower resolution and temporally reconstruct a pristine image up to 4K:

• Presets: Ultra Quality (0.77x), Quality (0.67x), Balanced (0.58x), Performance (0.50x), or Off (Native 1.0x).
• Subpixel Jitter & Velocity Buffers: Eliminates temporal shimmering and edge crawling during rapid camera turns.
• Robust RCAS Sharpening: Fine-tune image clarity without over-sharpening artifacts.

🌈 True HDR & In-Game Calibration Screen

Unlock the full potential of your OLED, Mini-LED, or HDR-capable display:

• Built-in Display Calibration Screen with live visual test patches.
• Fine-tune Peak Luminance (supports up to 2000 Nits, with presets for popular monitors like 456 Nits), Paper White UI Luminance, Black Level Floor (0.000 nits for OLED), and Middle Gray Contrast.
• DCI-P3 & BT.2020 Wide Color Gamut for deep greens, fiery sunset oranges, and neon reds.

💎 LabPBR Texturing & Volumetric Atmosphere

• LabPBR Standard: Seamlessly compatible with community LabPBR resource packs featuring _n (normals) and _s (smoothness / metalness / reflectance) textures.
• Parallax Occlusion Mapping (POM): Cobblestone, bricks, and bark pop with real geometrical relief and self-shadowing.
• Atmospheric Volumetrics: Dynamic god rays piercing through dense tree canopies and volumetric fog responding to weather.
• Dynamic Weather: Realistic wetness accumulation and glossy puddles forming during rainstorms.

🎮 Controls & Keybinds

⚙️ 1-Click Quality Presets

MCTrace features three optimized 1-click presets accessible from the top of the F6 menu:

• ⚡ Performance: Fast Ray Query, FSR Balanced, subtle SSAO, optimized volumetric fog and god rays, foliage SSS, dynamic lights, and rain wetness. Perfect for mid-range GPUs.
• ⚖ Balanced (Default): Standard Ray Query, FSR Quality, standard SSAO, full volumetrics, water SSR & caustics, LabPBR, POM (0.04x depth), foliage SSS, and hardware RT shadows.
• 💎 Ultra HDR / Cinematic: Maximum ray query samples, FSR Ultra Quality, enhanced SSAO, boosted god rays, POM (0.06x depth), and True 10-bit HDR wide-gamut tuning.

📋 System Requirements

🚀 Installation & First-Time Activation Guide

🎨 Custom Shader Packs

MCTrace supports custom Vulkan shader packs:

1. Open the in-game settings screen with F6 and click Shader Packs....
2. Click Open Shader Pack Folder to reveal .minecraft/shaderpacks/.
3. Drop any compatible .zip or uncompressed shader folder into this directory.
4. Select your pack from the list and hit Done!
5. Press F4 during gameplay to hot-reload shader changes instantly while developing.

❓ Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ)

No. OptiFine and Iris are built entirely on legacy OpenGL pipelines. MCTrace is a completely rewritten, modern Vulkan ray tracing engine. Do not install OptiFine or Iris alongside MCTrace.

This occurs if an early window attempts to create an OpenGL context when Vulkan expects GLFW_NO_API. MCTrace includes an automated bootstrapper that disables NeoForge's early loading window (earlyWindowControl = false in config/fml.toml). Ensure you complete the 3-launch setup described above.

No. MCTrace requires hardware support for the VK_KHR_ray_query and VK_KHR_acceleration_structure Vulkan extensions, which require NVIDIA RTX (Turing+), AMD RDNA2 (RX 6000+), or Intel Arc graphics cards.

Yes! MCTrace is 100% client-side. You can connect to any vanilla or NeoForge 26.2 server without needing the mod installed on the server.

Ensure HDR is enabled in Windows Display Settings (Win + Alt + B). Launch Minecraft with the Vulkan backend active, press F6, toggle True HDR Display to ON, and click Display Calibration... to calibrate your monitor's peak and paper white nits.

📦 Modpack & Redistribution Policy

• Modpacks: You are free to include MCTrace in any public or private modpack on CurseForge, Modrinth, or custom launchers.
• Source Code & Contributions: Licensed under the MIT License.
• Bug Reports & Feedback: Please report any issues or GPU feature requests on our GitHub Issue Tracker.