SEUS PTGI HRR 3 Shaders

SEUS shaders, by Sonic Ether, is the peak of realistic lighting in Minecraft. Players who want to make their game as realistic as possible, prefer SEUS as their choice of shader pack. SEUS PTGI HRR 3.0 is the latest version of SEUS available. Let us take a look at some of the features of this amazing pack.

Path-Tracing Effect

Path Traced Lighting

Light realism cannot get any better!

The PTGI variant of SEUS utilizes new features to make ray-tracing light feasible on non-RTX GPUs. Earlier, path-tracing light was especially designed to work on RTX GPUs, but this version of SEUS is here to change that. Whether it be an AMD GPU, or any other, this pack provides realistic ray-traced lighting with no issues.

Colored Shadows

Path-tracing through colored transparent blocks

When light passes through colored transparent blocks, like tinted glass, the light tends to phase through and output the color of the glass. Basically when light passes though a tinted glass block and falls on a surface, the shadow thus formed will have the color of the glass block.

Light Realism

Realistic Reflections

Opaque tinted glass, and translucent colored glass

On the other hand, tinted glass, which is not supposed to be transparent when viewing from one side, perfectly exhibits the intended behavior. When viewing from the outside, the tinted glass reflects the outside environment really well, while being translucent when viewed from the low lighted inside.

Source Dependent Light Color

Path-traced colored lighting

In the vanilla game, all light sources emit the same light, regardless of the source that emits it. This shader pack changes that behavior. Now, the color of light depends on the source it comes from. In the image above, it can be observed that lava emits orange light onto the surrounding blocks, while the soul fire on the right emits blue colored light.

Volumetry

Volumetric Clouds

Realistic three-dimensional clouds

Volumetry is a shader effect that many high-end shader packs utilize to make the visual elements appear as realistic as possible. This pack uses volumetric clouds that works well in combination with the volumetric lighting introduced by the pack.

Water Realism

Water Realism

Color depends on depth

Comparing the above image with the previous one, it can be seen how the depth of the water determined the color. The above image showcases a shallow pool of water, which appears fairly transparent, similar to that of a swimming pool. While the previous image showcases a large water body with high depth, and the water surface appears to be a of a dark solid shade, with reflections.

PBR Effects

PBR Effects

Texture used: AVPBR Reloaded

When it comes to SEUS shaders, there is no particular need to suggest a shader pack, as all realistic texture packs works well with the realistic shader effects of SEUS. But from out testing, texture packs like AVPBR, LBPR Reloaded and Patrix stood out well.

HardTop VanillAccurate Pack

128x variant

The above image shows how SEUS' lighting works with the crisp and ragged PBR features of the 128x variant of HardTop VanillAccurate Pack. You can observe how well the path tracing works with sub-block details. Shadows and bright-spots are well highlight on every bump and crevice on the 128x surface.

LBPR Reloaded

Recommended PBR texture pack

Pretty much any resource pack that is 64x or higher and has PBR textures will work well with the path tracing light effects of SEUS PTGI HRR 3.0.

The Nether

Let us now take a look at the visuals in the Nether dimension. There is no particular feature here that stands out from those introduced by other mid-end and high-end shader packs. The path-traces light and and colored light effects are still in play, but they do not contribute to visual aesthetics as well as they do in the Overworld.

The Nether

Path-traced and colored light

The End dimension appears to be a work in progress. We will update the images here as soon as a new version of the pack with a fully polished End is released.

Comparisons

Below are a few comparison sliders that will allows you to compare the visual aesthetics of this shader pack against the vanilla shader-less visuals.

The Overworld

The Nether

Performance

Performance wise, it is important to keep in mind that the pack utilized high-end shader effects, which makes this a high-end shader pack. By accessing the shader pack settings, certain effects can be disabled or their quality can be reduced to make the shader playable on mid-end systems.

Our tests were conducted on a mid-end HP Victus 15 Laptop with a full AMD set-up: AMD Ryzen 5000 series processor and AMD Radeon RX6500M GPU. The pack provided between 20-25 FPS, that is good enough to capture mesmerizing screenshots. And that is with 512x texture packs and 32 chunks render distance.

Similar tests were also conducted on a much more higher-end system with an AMD Ryzen 7 5700x processor and NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4060 GPU. The shader pack performed at a decent 35-40 FPS on these specs.

If you are fan of path-traced light and other realistic shader effects, this pack is the perfect choice.