This noticeably improves performance in heavy scenes, such as when many entities are visible. We've written many optimizations for vertex building and transformation, which helps to speed up immediate-mode rendering. We use a custom threading implementation which ensures chunk updates are better able to take advantage of multi-core CPUs, which greatly reduces the lag spikes that are caused by placing/breaking blocks. This is often much faster than the vanilla code, which helps to make chunk loading faster and less CPU-intensive. We use a fully-rewritten system for generating chunk geometry, including the biome colorization, lighting, and shading passes.
Together, these optimizations reduce video memory bandwidth requirements significantly, which is one of the game's biggest bottlenecks. Additionally, we make use of a second culling pass to eliminate geometry which is facing away from the camera (but still within the camera's view) so that the GPU does not need to process hidden geometry. We use a much more compact format for world geometry, which allows for up to a ~40% reduction in the amount of video memory used by chunks. For chunk rendering, we make use of geometry batching and draw pass consolidation, which greatly reduces the amount of CPU overhead involved in rendering the world. We replace all of Minecraft's world rendering code with our own implementation that is built upon modern rendering techniques. The following list tries to cover some of the most significant changes which are responsible for our performance improvements, but it's not complete or exhaustive of everything Sodium does. So, how exactly does Sodium work? We obviously cannot just say that the game is magically faster without providing some kind of explanation. Out-of-date graphics drivers are often the reason for most crashes, rendering bugs, and performance issues. If you are running into problems, you should make sure that your graphics drivers are up-to-date. These translation layers do not implement required functionality and they suffer from underlying driver bugs which cannot be worked around. In some cases, older graphics cards may also work (so long as they have up-to-date drivers which have support for OpenGL 3.3), but they are not officially supported, and may not be compatible with future versions of Sodium.Īndroid devices which use OpenGL translation layers (such as GL4ES, ANGLE, etc) are not supported and will very likely not work with Sodium. AMD Radeon HD 7000 Series (GCN 1) or newer.NVIDIA GeForce 400 Series (Fermi) or newer.INTEL HD Graphics 500 Series (Skylake) or newer.Most graphics cards released in the past 12 years are compatible. We only support graphics cards which have up-to-date drivers that are compatible with OpenGL 4.6. This is done so that players can pick and choose which mods they want to use, but we generally recommend using our entire collection. You should also install our other mods, such as Lithium (for MC 1.15+) and Phosphor (for MC <1.19), to optimize the other parts of your game. Need even more performance? By design, Sodium only optimizes the rendering code of Minecraft.
You should generally only change video settings related to performance and other advanced features if you are experiencing issues. By default, Sodium will enable all optimizations which are supported on your system, giving you the best experience possible. Not sure how to configure the mod? Don't worry, you probably don't need to. Not sure if you installed the mod correctly? Check your Video Settings screen in Minecraft, which should show our new and improved user interface for changing settings. Once you have installed Fabric Loader, you can simply place Sodium into your mods folder like anything else.
If you are using a third-party launcher, it probably has built-in functionality to automatically install mod loaders. Sodium is a Fabric mod, which means it requires the Fabric Loader. It contains important instructions on how to prevent crashes and other performance problems. Please make sure you read the Driver Compatibility section on our wiki before you install Sodium. It boasts wide compatibility with the Fabric mod ecosystem when compared to other rendering-focused mods, and it does so without compromising on how the game looks, giving you that authentic block game feel. Sodium is a free and open-source mod for Minecraft 1.16+ clients which greatly improves rendering performance while fixing some graphical issues. If you would like to show a token of your appreciation for our work, and help support the development of Sodium in the process, then consider buying us a coffee. This mod is the result of thousands of hours of development, and is made possible thanks to players like you.