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ShadersMod was never updated past 1.12, and it lacks support for many of the many modern popular shaderpacks. It's also mutually incompatible with Sodium, the best rendering optimization mod in existence by a large margin.
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OptiFine, the current dominant mod for loading shader packs, has restrictive licensing that firmly stands in the way of any sort of tinkering, and is fairly notorious for having compatibility issues with the mods that I like. Iris was created to fill a void that I saw in the Minecraft customization and graphical enhancement community: the lack of an open-source shaders mod that would let me load my favorite shader packs on modern versions of the game, while retaining performance and compatibility with modpacks.
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