Potato Shaders is a pack by RRe36 built to run on, in the author’s words, a literal potato of a PC. The trick is what it leaves out. There are no dynamic shadows and none of the other expensive effects, so the GPU does far less work than with a realistic pack. What remains is color, light and water done better than vanilla.
That also means the old description of this page, promising shadows, was wrong. If shadows matter to you, look at Sildur’s Enhanced Default, the next step up.
What you get instead of shadows
RRe36 lists these features:
- dynamic colors and tonemapping, which make daylight warmer and nights less flat;
- bloom around bright sources;
- depth of field and motion blur;
- temporal anti-aliasing for cleaner edges;
- ambient occlusion in corners and under blocks;
- custom water and normal map support.
Depth of field and motion blur are the first things to switch off in the shader settings if frames are tight. They cost performance and many players find them distracting anyway.
Check your hardware first
A light pack still has minimum requirements, and these are the ones the author publishes:
- a graphics card that supports OpenGL 4.0;
- Windows or Linux (macOS is not listed);
- on Windows, Intel HD 5000 Graphics and older are not supported because of Intel’s drivers;
- OptiFine for 1.12 or newer, or Iris 1.5.0 or newer.
If your laptop has an Intel HD 4000 or similar, the pack may refuse to load or show a broken image, and no setting will fix it. A driver update is worth trying for everything newer.
A low-end setup around it
On a weak PC the loader matters as much as the pack. The usual combination is Sodium plus Iris: the Iris installer can set up both at once, Sodium speeds up chunk rendering and Iris loads the shader. Put the zip into Video Settings, Shader Packs, Open Shader Pack Folder, then select it. With OptiFine the same zip goes into the folder opened from Video Settings, Shaders, Shaders Folder.
Next, swap the textures. A low-resolution pack from our FPS boost textures list takes load off the GPU, and Potato’s normal map support simply stays idle with it. Then lower the render distance and go through the rest of our FPS guide.
Questions players ask
Does it work on Minecraft PE or Bedrock?
No. Potato is a Java Edition pack for OptiFine or Iris. Bedrock does not load this kind of shader.
Will it run on 1.21?
The file here is v1.0d from June 2023, the latest release. The author tagged it for 1.12 through 1.20.1, so on 1.21 and newer it is untested. If it misbehaves there, Sildur’s Enhanced Default is updated for current versions.
Can I use it on Fabric?
Yes, through Iris. Fabric itself has no shader support, and OptiFine does not run alongside Sodium, so on Fabric Iris is the loader to use. Iris also exists for Quilt and NeoForge.
Is this the Poisonous Potato update?
No. That was Mojang’s April Fools snapshot from 2024. This pack only shares the word potato, as in a slow computer.