Tessera V1

Tessera V1

A terrain renderer for Minecraft that hands the work to your graphics card.

Tessera replaces how Minecraft draws the world's blocks. Instead of the CPU preparing every chunk for drawing, Tessera uses mesh shaders, a modern GPU feature, to let the graphics card decide by itself what is visible and draw only that. It runs on Minecraft's new Vulkan renderer, on NVIDIA, AMD and Intel graphics cards.

Alpha. Tessera is young. It is tested daily and falls back to vanilla rendering if anything goes wrong, but expect rough edges, and please report what you find.

Features

• Mesh-shader terrain. Chunks are drawn with Vulkan mesh shaders (VK_EXT_mesh_shader), the same cross-vendor feature on NVIDIA, AMD and Intel.
• GPU culling. The graphics card skips, by itself, every group of block faces that:
  • faces away from you,
  • is outside your view, or
  • is hidden behind other terrain. This uses a two-pass depth-pyramid test, the same idea as Unreal Engine's Nanite.
• Fewer faces to draw. Tessera has its own chunk mesher. It drops hidden faces and merges matching neighbouring faces into larger ones, while keeping vanilla's smooth lighting and ambient occlusion.
• Correct water and glass from any angle. Translucent blocks are sorted back to front on the GPU. A section is only re-sorted when it changes or you have moved far enough to matter, so standing still costs nothing.
• Looks like vanilla. In side-by-side tests against vanilla, in the same world at the same moment, under 1% of pixels differ on land, glass and water. Most of the difference is vanilla's water animation being on another frame. Fog, fade-in, smooth lighting, texture filtering and the Improved Transparency option all behave like vanilla.
• Works with modded blocks. Blocks with custom models go through the Fabric Rendering API, so mods that change how blocks look keep working.
• Fails safe. If your PC can't run Tessera (OpenGL selected, no mesh-shader support), it tells you once and leaves the game exactly as vanilla. If something breaks while you play, Tessera hands terrain back to vanilla for the rest of the session instead of crashing.
• Grows as needed. Terrain memory on the GPU starts at 512 MiB and grows by itself at high render distances.
• See what it's doing. Press F3 for a Tessera terrain line: sections drawn, quads, GPU memory and Tessera's GPU time.

Performance

Measured on an RTX 3060 at 1920×1080, Vulkan, fixed seed, the same spots for every run:

The biggest gains come where a lot of terrain is hidden behind other terrain (hills, mountains, caves, cities), because the GPU skips it. Your results will depend on your graphics card, settings and world.

Tessera and Sodium

Sodium is excellent, mature, and works on almost any PC. Tessera takes a different approach:

Why this approach can be faster:

• It frees the CPU: the graphics card does the culling itself, without waiting on the CPU.
• It frees the GPU: hidden terrain never reaches the drawing stage.
• It grows with your graphics card: a stronger GPU culls and draws more, and a busy CPU matters less.

Where things stand: on the developer's RTX 3060, Sodium gave about 1000–1200 FPS and Tessera holds about 1200 FPS in the same world. These are informal readings, not a controlled benchmark. A proper head-to-head against Sodium (render distances 32, 64 and 96, on NVIDIA, AMD and Intel) is the next milestone, and the results will be posted here, good or bad.

Don't install Tessera together with Sodium, or any other mod that replaces chunk rendering. Pick one.

Drawbacks and limitations

Please read these before installing:

• You need the Vulkan renderer. Set Options → Video Settings → Graphics API → Prefer Vulkan (Experimental) and restart. Minecraft's Vulkan backend is still marked experimental by Mojang. On OpenGL, Tessera does nothing.
• You need a GPU with mesh shaders: NVIDIA GTX 16xx / RTX 20xx or newer, AMD RX 6000 or newer, or Intel Arc. Older cards and most integrated graphics aren't supported yet. A fallback path for them is planned.
• Windows and Linux only. macOS has no Vulkan mesh shaders.
• Only terrain is faster. Entities, mobs, particles, chests and other block entities are still drawn by vanilla. Scenes full of mobs or item frames won't gain much.
• No shader packs. Iris and OptiFine-style shader packs aren't supported.
• More video memory at high render distances. Tessera keeps terrain on the GPU. At render distance 32 it can use well over 512 MiB, more while a new world is loading.
• No distant-terrain simplification yet. Every chunk is drawn at full detail, so very high render distances still cost a lot. Level-of-detail for far terrain is planned.
• Alpha software. Bugs are possible. Recent versions fixed missing ocean sections at render distance 32. If something looks wrong, a screenshot with F3 open helps a lot.
• Very far water is sorted a little less often, to save time. In testing this is not visible, but it is not as exact as re-sorting every frame.

Requirements

• Minecraft 26.2
• Fabric Loader 0.19.5 or newer, and Fabric API
• Java 25
• The Vulkan graphics API selected in Video Settings
• A GPU with mesh shaders (see above), on Windows or Linux

Installation

1. Install Fabric Loader and Fabric API for Minecraft 26.2.
2. Put Tessera in your mods folder.
3. Start the game, open Options → Video Settings → Graphics API, choose Prefer Vulkan (Experimental), then restart Minecraft.
4. Open a world and press F3. Under the chunk stats you should see a line starting with Tessera terrain:. If it's there, Tessera is drawing your world.

Configuration

config/tessera.properties is created on first launch:

FAQ

My FPS didn't change.
Check that the Graphics API is set to Vulkan and that the F3 screen shows the Tessera terrain line. If it says Tessera is off or failed, the line tells you why.

Is it safe to remove?
Yes. Tessera only changes how terrain is drawn and never touches your worlds.

Does it work on servers?
It is client-side only, so it works on any server, and the server doesn't need it.

Does it work with other mods?
Mods that add blocks, including blocks with custom models, should work. Mods that replace chunk rendering (Sodium, Embeddium and the like) or add shader packs (Iris) don't.

Roadmap

• ✔ Mesh-shader terrain with its own chunk mesher
• ✔ GPU culling: facing, view and two-pass hidden-terrain (depth pyramid)
• ✔ Water, glass and other translucent blocks, sorted on the GPU, and Fabric Rendering API support
• ◻ Benchmarks against Sodium at render distances 32, 64 and 96, on NVIDIA, AMD and Intel
• ◻ A fallback path for graphics cards without mesh shaders, and simplified far-distance terrain (LOD)

Credits and license

Tessera is free and open source under the LGPL-3.0.

• Parts of its Vulkan setup are adapted from Meshelium by Ded811: the mesh-shader device hook, the Vulkan accessors, the runtime shader compiler and the mesh-shader pipeline setup. Both projects are LGPL-3.0.
• Nvidium by MCRcortex was the design inspiration for mesh-shader terrain.
• Tessera contains no code from Sodium.

The NOTICE file in the download lists exactly what was adapted.