We’re still hard at work getting Vibrant Visuals ready for Minecraft: Java Edition. If you’ve been following our updates, then you’ll know we’ve been exploring refactoring and looking at ways to modernize our rendering code. Following this work, we’re now preparing to make a change to the underlying technology we use to render the game, by switching from OpenGL to Vulkan.

Minecraft will be so so much better. There is already a performance mod called VulkanMod which does the same thing and oh boy it beats Sodium by a whopping margin

I do hope that projects such as Sodium or similar still have a future, though.

The performance aspects won't be as needed, but I appreciate getting a lot of control over the rendering to customise it for personal preference.

Similarly for shaders. Vibrant Visuals is one thing but some of the shaders people have developed are even better looking, such as Complimentary. - and come with a lot more knobs to twiddle.

Plus the MC shader community’s “LabPBR” texture format is awesome. If Vibrant Visuals on Java uses the format they did for Bedrock, it won’t support some really cool texture information. Plus shaderpacks often include effects far outside the scope of VV, so I think there’ll remain reason for something like Iris to exist. I’m excited to see the possibilities for hardware accelerated raytracing on Java with this change, though!

For sure. I very much appreciate the effort the modding community puts in and I'm certain the efforts will continue on Vulkan

I keep forgetting that bedrock trash is more popular that the PC platform the game was designed for. I mean it shouldn't have been made in Java to begin with, but still.

They will, Iris shaders will probably not be ported over to Vulkan, however this is entirely because the Iris devs are already working on an Iris successor. Also I will doubt that the shaders will be lost.

On the Sodium side, the dev has already created a build with Vulkan support.