If you don’t already have Forge, it’s kind of a requirement for installing and running an ever-growing package of different mods it’s something you should already have if you do extensive modding. This is a Forge mod, so you must have the correct version of Minecraft Forge installed and ready to go if you want to use the Shaders Mod. Thankfully the Shaders Mod is highly compatible with a number of other mods, including Optifine and Forge. Some drivers seem to work incredibly poorly with this mod, and you can find a short list at the mod’s page, which you can find at Minecraft Forum as well as a number of other websites. If you run into slowdowns, glitches, and crashes even with a CPU and GPU powerful enough to render all the shading, lighting, and shadow effects produced by the GLSL Shaders Mod, then you might want to look at the driver version you’re using for your graphics card. Other shader packs like Sildur’s will give you some decent lighting effects that aren’t as demanding if you absolutely need them. Basically, if you don’t have a great computer, you probably shouldn’t even look at this mod.

In fact, you would need to get something close to 200 FPS if you wanted to use the Shaders Mod and still get a decent framerate with all of the settings turned up to their maximum values. The Shaders Mod can have such a strong effect on Minecraft that the FPS may be seriously reduced, even for players who normally get a nice 60+ FPS when playing the game normally.

There are actually normal maps and specular maps to consider too, because the Shaders Mod allows you to change the appearance of your Minecraft world in some unexpected ways by modifying these aspects of the game, which you may not have even realized existed without this mod. This mod, authored by karyonix, is actually a fine shader mod that adds a special shadow map to the world to complement the lightmap which is already there. There are so many shader packs and mods out there that the Shaders Mod might easily be overlooked by players who search using more specific terms.

Minecraft 1.16.5 shaders