Iris VS Starlight

Compare Iris vs Starlight and see what are their differences.

Iris

A modern shaders mod for Minecraft compatible with existing OptiFine shader packs (by IrisShaders)

Starlight

Rewrites the light engine to fix lighting performance and lighting errors (by PaperMC)
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Iris Starlight
134 31
3,046 1,275
3.2% -
8.6 6.6
4 days ago 20 days ago
Java Java
GNU Lesser General Public License v3.0 only GNU General Public License v3.0 or later
The number of mentions indicates the total number of mentions that we've tracked plus the number of user suggested alternatives.
Stars - the number of stars that a project has on GitHub. Growth - month over month growth in stars.
Activity is a relative number indicating how actively a project is being developed. Recent commits have higher weight than older ones.
For example, an activity of 9.0 indicates that a project is amongst the top 10% of the most actively developed projects that we are tracking.

Iris

Posts with mentions or reviews of Iris. We have used some of these posts to build our list of alternatives and similar projects. The last one was on 2023-06-22.

Starlight

Posts with mentions or reviews of Starlight. We have used some of these posts to build our list of alternatives and similar projects. The last one was on 2023-02-02.
  • How do voxel games like Minecraft store and load worlds?
    4 projects | /r/gamedev | 2 Feb 2023
    Link to Starlight
  • Attempting to stop Vault Hunters from Freezing every 2minutes
    3 projects | /r/VaultHuntersMinecraft | 9 Aug 2022
    i can confirm what mrspinn has posted but I would use rubidium and not magnesium(both ports of sodium, just a different authors on the ports.), this works with magnesium/rubidium extras as well for things like a better zoom function(runs off the sodium base so both ports are fine). Then if you'd like shaders with this you can use oculus(port of iris), this works with optifine shader packs. Road runner is good for cleaning up a lot of the overhead in things like game physics, AI, block ticking, etc (port of lithium, don't know why this one didn't keep the chemical name). Starlight again is good at what it does, even to the point of being integrated into papermc(which is why it's on their github and not the spottedleaf's personal anymore), don't know if you've sent much time around plugin servers. I also then use Ferritecore this greatly helps bring down memory requirements of the pack(I can run on 4gb, given I have fairly fast memory).
  • Sodium, what is it?
    3 projects | /r/Minecraft | 27 Dec 2021
    It's just that. It's a free and open source optimization mod that aims to improve fps, and fixes other issues. Along with that, Sodium is free and open source (available on GitHub). By default, Sodium does not provide shader support, and shader support can be done with Iris (Iris is also open source and free as well). But if you want to optimize your fps even more, you can bring in Lithium and Starlight (Lithium targets overall optimization, like the AI and other stuff without breaking the game, and Starlight is a complete rewrite of the vanilla lighting engine to be even more faster and fixes so much stuff with the lighting engine). And you can tack on more mods, like FerriteCore, Enchaned Block Entities (EBE) in order to optimize other parts of the game
  • What's your performance mod combo?
    5 projects | /r/fabricmc | 22 Dec 2021
    Starlight v1.0.0
  • How do i change the sevrer version from paper to fabric without losing the nether?
    2 projects | /r/admincraft | 24 Nov 2021
    Source? I can't find it for paper. the Github says it's only for fabric https://github.com/PaperMC/Starlight
  • Guilty as charged
    4 projects | /r/gaming | 8 Nov 2021
    Just a little note, but Starlight is much more efficient than Phosphor, and i'ts even given me less issues with other mods.
  • Help please!
    4 projects | /r/Minecraft | 2 Oct 2021
    Once loaded, it is ready to go. I suggest running it with Lithium and Starlight for the best fps
  • Minecraft Server Software Optimization be like: (Mojang wen fix?)
    2 projects | /r/admincraft | 19 Sep 2021
  • Got an old PC? Here's how you can play 1.17!
    3 projects | /r/Minecraft | 11 Sep 2021
    Starlight: https://github.com/PaperMC/Starlight/releases, get the latest jar
  • Is there a better FPS boost client than Optifine? (Java 1.17.1)
    2 projects | /r/Minecraft | 6 Sep 2021
    I'm sure you've heard of Forge. It is a "client" that allows the game to run modifications. Well there's a new modloader that is better for performance called Fabric. There are many mods for fabric that boost your fps by a lot like Sodium (https://github.com/CaffeineMC/sodium-fabric/releases/tag/mc1.17.1-0.3.0), Lithium (https://www.curseforge.com/minecraft/mc-mods/lithium/files), Starlight (https://github.com/PaperMC/Starlight/releases), Krypton (https://www.curseforge.com/minecraft/mc-mods/krypton/files) and some more.

What are some alternatives?

When comparing Iris and Starlight you can also consider the following projects:

phosphor-fabric - A Fabric mod designed to dramatically improve the performance of Minecraft's lighting engine while fixing many bugs

sodium-fabric - A Fabric mod designed to improve frame rates and reduce micro-stutter

lithium-fabric - A Fabric mod designed to improve the general performance of Minecraft without breaking things

LambDynamicLights - A dynamic lights mod for Minecraft with Fabric.

sodium-fabric - A fork of Sodium adding Iris compatibility. EXPERIMENTAL AND UNSTABLE, DON'T BE SURPRISED IF THERE ARE RENDERING ISSUES, BUGS, AND CRASHES.

C2ME-fabric - A Fabric mod designed to improve the chunk performance of Minecraft.

optifine

Indium - A JavaScript development environment for Emacs

sodium-extra-fabric - Features that shouldn't be in Sodium.

Indium - Sodium addon providing support for the Fabric Rendering API, based on Indigo

canvas - Shader-Based Minecraft Renderer for Fabric