10 Best Minecraft Shaders for Low-End PCs (2024)

If you are one of the low-end PC gamers and still want to experience Minecraft with shaders, you have arrived at the perfect place. We have collected some of the best shaders for low-end PCs that can deliver improved graphics while maintaining your FPS. You’ll only need to install Optifine in Minecraft to run them. Once you do that, it is time to dive in and check out some of the best FPS-friendly Minecraft shaders!

1. Cyanide Shaders

Cyanide is one of the simplest shader packs for Minecraft users with low-end PCs. Unless you are a regular player, you might not even notice the differences it brings to the game. It removes unnecessary animations from the game and makes most of the textures vibrant and more contrasting. Such changes are quite advantageous on Minecraft PvP servers and mini-games.

In terms of features, it provides tone mapping to smoothen textures, general bloom effect, and very basic lighting details. The world looks mystical during sunset and sunrise and stays overtly lit during the rest of the day. You can explore all of the Minecraft biomes without witnessing anything out of place in the overworld, Nether, and End dimensions.

But exploring the caves and nighttime with this shader might not be the best idea. Unless you are using the Potion of Night vision, the world can be quite deadly and scary in dark areas. To make the matters worse, possibly due to a missing update, the Cyanide shaders don’t even light up low-light sources like candles. So, even though you might get high FPS, you can end up having a tough time finding your enemy.

Download Cyanide Minecraft Shaders

2. YoFPS Shader (Chocapic13 Edit)

YoFPS picks up the best features of the Chocapic13, which is one of the best Minecraft shaderpacks, and ports them for low-end PCs. You get custom sky, subtle light scattering, light emission, vanilla animations, and good FPS.

One place where the YoFPS shaders struggle a bit is handling the sunlight and lava, which appear brighter than even their vanilla variants. Because of that, you might have some trouble exploring the overworld in hot Minecraft biomes and the Nether dimension around the lava lake. However, this punch of brightness does come in handy during cave excavation.

If you wish to fight Warden in Minecraft while having reliable lighting and atmospheric darkness, YoFPS is a reliable shader pack. Unless there’s a lava source nearby, you will find caves and dark areas to have the right amount of light.

Download YoFPS Shader (Chocapic13 Edit)

3. Sildur’s Basic Shaders

Sildrur’s basic shaders is a pretty lightweight and fast Minecraft shader pack, which is perfect for a low-end PC. It provides a yellowish tint to the environment, thus making it seem warmer. It also brightens the darker spots fairly well, making contrast less obvious. Thanks to various customizations, this shader pack can be further modified to suit your needs.

It supports the following options: antialiasing, sharpening, ambient occlusion, celshading, color boost, color filter, custom emissive lightmaps, custom sun/moon angle, tone mapping, depth of field, motion blur, bump and parallax mapping, as well as wavy features.

During the night, beside the fact every block seems a bit orange, the dark spots are not as dark in vanilla. Particles don’t stand out too much and the world is generally very pleasant to look at.

Download Sildur’s Basic Shaders

4. Tea Shaders

Unlike the previous shader pack, Tea shaders don’t focus on bumping the brightness, nor adding too much tint to the existing textures, but they make the world clearer and more atmospheric. The fog is much more prominent shadows are not as dark as in the vanilla game. The water is darker and less transparent.

The current features include waving grass, leaves and water, customizable watercolor with three settings for texture and biome effects, custom swamp biome effect, customizable fog, Nether heat refraction effect and so many more.

Tea shaders make the world significantly darker during the night, which can make spotting monsters a bit more difficult. Moreover, due to the pitch black night sky, the stars stand out a lot, which makes for some pretty breath-taking nighttime adventures.

Download Tea Shaders

5. DrDestens MCShaders

The DrDestens MCShaders provide simple but fairly beautiful features. First of all, the water has changed quite drastically. It becomes reflective and more realistic. Moreover, because of the “water fog”, it also seems darker and it’s not possible to see too deep, which would be scary if you played with mods that add underwater monsters.

The whole world seems a lot brighter and contrast is not emphasized. The fog isn’t as important as in the Tea Shaders but does play a greater role than in the vanilla game. Some of the many features DrDestens MCShaders provide are anti-aliasing, physically based rendering, various water effects, bloom, and more.

The nighttime with these shaders looks nothing less than gorgeous. The water is a lot darker, but the surface is not. The light emitted from light source blocks is more vibrant, which creates distinctive contrast points. The sky is not pitch black, but stars still manage to catch your eye so easily. There is a lot to this shader pack than meets the eye at first, so check it out if you’re interested.

Download DrDestens MCShaders

6. Builder’s QOL

Like most players, if you only want realistic water in Minecraft on your low-end PC, Builder’s Quality of Life shaders is your most reliable option. It turns most of Minecraft’s water translucent and also adds a subtle flow animation. Even the blocks that are beneath or behind water appear to be slow-moving state.

Leaving liquid aside, the rest of your world would look more or less the same with this shader pack. It doesn’t focus heavily on lighting and instead tries to smoothen the world while keeping it brighter than vanilla. As per the developer, such subtle changes make your building experience convenient and smooth.

From a combat perspective, the shader pack doesn’t give you any major advantage or disadvantage. But the boost in FPS and better-looking water is perfect for leveling up your next Minecraft house build.

Download Builder’s QOL Minecraft Shaders

7. MakeUp – Ultra Fast

MakeUp – Ultra Fastshaders are my first choice whenever I can’t decide which shader to use within the game. It provides good in-game performance and significant graphical upgrades. You can also expect anti-aliasing, ambient occlusion, motion blur, volumetric sky, waving plants, realistic reflections, and more in this shader pack.

The best part about this shader pack isn’t the features provided here, but instead, it’s the ability to turn them off as per our preference. You get to choose which part of your game should stay vanilla and which aspect should look realistic. Such space for experimentation allows you to find the settings that look good and also work well according to your PC’s limits.

Finally, when it comes to dark areas, this shader can turn your cave exploration into nightmares due to extremely low brightness. You can reduce the darkness slightly in the shader’s settings, but we’d suggest you carry a lot of torches anyway.

Download MakeUp – Ultra Fast Minecraft Shaders

8. Lagless Shaders

As the name reveals, Lagless shaders only try to reduce lag in your game. And the results you get are promising as long as you don’t mind your world being a little darker. The most performance-heavy aspect of a game is the lighting. And well, Lagless shaders use that logic to replace global lighting and focus on the brightness of individual blocks.

Because of such a different take on light, what we are left with is a world with a vignette filter. The game runs far better than the standard version but also creates a lot of dark areas, especially in caves and underwater. Unless it is a light source like lava, you might even not see it in the nighttime.

Even though most of what Lagless shaders provide is based on taste, we’d still suggest you avoid fighting the Warden with this shader. Combined with the darkness effect, you might become almost blind with this shader active in Minecraft.

Download Lagless Minecraft Shaders

9. Naelego’s Cel Shaders

If you like to use cartoonish texture packs, Naelego’s Cel shaders are made for you. They create an outline for most blocks and entities in this blocky game. The effect doesn’t affect your performance or FPS in any way but does add a welcoming hand-drawn effect to the game.

Other than the black outlines, you also get subtle lighting and texture improvements but nothing too significant. Realistically, you can only notice these changes during nighttime or in darker areas where light would appear to be brighter than vanilla Minecraft.

Even if you are not looking for realistic graphics, Naelego’s Cel Shaders can definitely breathe new life into your Minecraft world. And it can make them look cartoonish and fun.

Download Naelego’s Cel

10. Potato Shaders

In the gaming community, “potato” is a term used to describe the lowest-specced PCs and lowest details in video settings. Doing a play on that, we have Potato shaders for Minecraft. These shaders improve your game’s graphics while keeping the FPS from dropping too low.

You get transparent water, reflective blocks, improved animations, and smooth textures, all without hampering the performance. Unlike most shaders on our list, Potato shaders have perfectly lit days and the best-looking Ancient cities and other dark areas.

With the perfect balance of good graphics and lightweight changes, the Potato shaders are perfect for every low-end potato PC running Minecraft. And the best part is that you can even use them on higher-end systems for a significant FPS boost.

Download Potato Minecraft Shaders

With that, you are ready to experience the best performance alongside quality graphics in Minecraft on your low-end machine. And if somehow, these shaders for low-end PCs are not enough, you can also use some of the best Minecraft texture packs.

A lot of them offer smooth textures that can lift your FPS to its highest limits. Not to forget, you can also install some of the best Minecraft modpacks as they offer the same performance improvements. With that said, which is your favorite Minecraft shader pack? Tell us in the comments!