Mojang have given an update on the upcoming Vibrant Visuals update, that brings many visual enhancements to Minecraft. The update is initially rolling out for Minecraft: Bedrock Edition but work is ongoing for the Java version.
What's it going to add in? Various visual enhancements like new lighting, fog, shadows that move with the sun, enhanced water rendering with reflections and much more. A fair amount of the changes are a little subtle but all added together, Minecraft will look a lot more modern and fancy.
In a news post for Minecraft Java the developers at Mojang have said how they're "rebuilding the code in a way that will not only support visual updates like Vibrant Visuals, but future enhancements, too – without sacrificing stability or performance". This includes "separating our gameplay code from our rendering code and bringing the latter up to date with more modern approaches to rendering".
Once that is completed their plan is to add in a "modern rendering pipeline that will give us a strong foundation to build upon, making visual changes and performance improvements easier in the future – for us, and modders too". They're taking their time to ensure it's done properly and to ensure it works across all supported devices and systems including "Windows, Mac, Linux" which they said they "know that is going to be a challenge"
So we're still a while away from seeing it in Minecraft Java but they're on it.

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Source: Mojang
My younger kids have quite potato-speed laptops, and turning the shaders a bit down, the performance is about twice as much as vanilla on those laptops. And it looks way better too.
You can play on native servers with this pack, as long as the base version is the same. Speaking of servers, the performance on the server side is way better, too.