Sodium Mod 1.18.2 → 1.19.3 (Unlock the Full Power of Your Minecraft Experience )

Sodium is an amazing mod for Minecraft 1.16+ that can dramatically improve your gaming experience. It increases frame rates and reduces stuttering while also fixing a variety of graphical issues without compromising on the game’s visuals. Even better, it offers wide compatibility with the Fabric mod ecosystem, allowing you to get the most out of your mods while still maintaining a real-looking block world. With Sodium, you’ll be sure to enjoy a smooth game experience with no major graphic glitches or slowdowns.

What Does Sodium Do?

Sodium is an advanced mod that optimizes how the game renders graphics and models, resulting in smooth performance, fewer stutters, and improved frame rates. It also helps to fix common graphical issues such as flickering textures or blocky models. The best part about Sodium is that it doesn’t compromise on how the game looks—it still gives you that authentic block game feel that so many people love about Minecraft.

Compatibility with Fabric Mods

One of the great things about Sodium is its compatibility with the Fabric mod ecosystem. This means that when compared to other rendering-focused mods, Sodium is much easier to install and use without having to worry about compatibility issues. It has also been designed to be lightweight, meaning it won’t drag down your computer’s performance or put too much strain on your device.
Sodium also supports a number of different shader packs ranging from low-end machines all the way up to high-end gaming rigs so no matter what type of computer you have, you can still enjoy optimized performance with beautiful graphics.

🔥 Performance

Here are some performance metrics which can be used to determine the improvements to expect from using Sodium on your computer. Framerate can be improved for a wide range of computers, whether fast or slow. Most players report a 250% to 500% increase in average frame rates.

As explained, you can expect to see significant improvements regardless of the age or make of your PC build. Whether it be the best gaming PC in the world or the worst craptop ever, starry skies inbound!

✅ Compatibility

Sodium is mostly stable at this point, but it does not yet contain support for the Fabric Rendering API, which a small number of mods currently use. If you try to use these mods with Sodium, your game may crash or behave unexpectedly.

We try to ensure compatibility with most graphics cards that have up-to-date drivers for OpenGL 4.6 Core, which covers most graphics cards released after mid-2010.

✔️INTEL HD Graphics 500 Series (Skylake) or newer

✔️NVIDIA GeForce 400 Series (Fermi) or newer

✔️AMD Radeon HD 7000 Series (GCN 1) or newer

Older graphics cards may also work (so long as they have up-to-date drivers for at least OpenGL 3.3 Core), but hardware requirements are subject to change in future releases.

If you encounter issues with Sodium, you should make sure that your graphics drivers are up-to-date, as this is the most often the culprit of poor performance, crashes, and rendering bugs.

⚙️ Technical details

Of course, we can’t just say that the game is magically faster without providing some kind of explanation. This list tries to cover some of the most significant changes which are responsible for performance improvements, but it’s not complete or exhaustive of everything Sodium does.

• A modern OpenGL rendering pipeline for chunk rendering that takes advantage of multi-draw techniques, allowing for a significant reduction in CPU overhead (~90%) when rendering the world. This can make a huge difference to frame rates for most computers that are not bottle-necked by the GPU or other components. Even if your GPU can’t keep up, you’ll experience much more stable frame times thanks to the CPU being able to work on other rendering tasks while it waits.
• Vertex data for rendered chunks is made much more compact, allowing for video memory and bandwidth requirements to be cut by almost 40%.
• Nearby block updates now take advantage of multi-threading, greatly reducing lag spikes caused by chunks needing to be updated. (before, after)
• Chunk faces which are not visible (or facing away from the camera) are culled very early in the rendering process, eliminating a ton of geometry that would have to be processed on the GPU only to be immediately discarded. For integrated GPUs, this can greatly reduce memory bandwidth requirements and provide a modest speedup even when GPU-bound.
• Plentiful optimizations for chunk loading and block rendering, making chunk loading significantly faster and less damaging to frame rates. (before, after)
• Many optimizations for vertex building and matrix transformations, speeding up block entity, mob, and item rendering significantly for when you get carried away placing too many chests in one room.
• Many improvements to how the game manages memory and allocates objects, which in turn reduces memory consumption and lag spikes caused by garbage collector activity.
• Many graphical fixes for smooth lighting effects, making the game run better while still applying a healthy amount of optimization. For example, take this before and after of a white concrete room in vanilla, or this comparison while underwater.
• Smooth lighting for fluids and other special blocks. (comparison)
• Smooth biome blending for blocks and fluids, providing greatly improved graphical quality that is significantly less computationally intensive. (comparison)
• Animated textures which are not visible in the world are not updated, speeding up texture updating on most hardware (especially AMD cards.)

… and much more, this list is still being written after the initial release.

A deeper look at Sodium mod settings for more FPS in Minecraft 1.19

General settings

When players first open the game and head into video settings, they will witness a completely different UI, courtesy of the mod. There will be different tabs at the top with detailed settings under each of them. Players must first tweak and understand all the general settings that are already present in the game.

Render distance should be the first setting to tweak. This has the most impact on the FPS of the game since it determines how many chunks are loaded and visible when players are not moving. This should be somewhere around 7 to 15, depending on how powerful the PC the game is running on is.

Players must also reduce simulation distance as this determines how many loaded chunks have active mobs and blocks. Next, they must uncheck the VSync option and set Max Framerate to Unlimited so that they get the most amount of FPS.

Quality settings

The next tab will be Quality, where players can set the overall graphics of the game to Fast if they want to get the highest FPS possible. Along with this, clouds, weather, leaf quality, and more can be reduced as well.

Sodium-specific settings

Performance settings

Once the previous two tabs are tweaked, players can go to the Performance tab, which offers in-depth technical settings for the game. Fortunately, the mod will automatically switch on all the settings in this tab to increase FPS. Players can read about all the settings by hovering their mouse over them and can also change them if they notice any dips in performance.

Advanced settings

The Advanced tab settings will also have everything tweaked from the beginning to facilitate increased FPS. Similar to the Performance tab, players can change a few settings after playing the game for a while and observing the changes. Ideally, the Chunk update settings should be set to 0, and Chunk Render-Ahead Limit should be set to 3 at the minimum.

Which graphics mod is better for Minecraft 1.19: OptiFine or Sodium

OptiFine 

OptiFine is a great mod for Minecraft 1.19 as it enhances the game’s overall graphical performance. From lighting and shadows to the rendering of chunks, this mod efficiently changes how the game feels while maintaining its vanilla graphics.

Some of the mod’s most beloved features include ultra-zoom, dynamic lighting, live FPS counter, direct shader support, and many more. Furthermore, OptiFine also offers players a plethora of graphical settings that can be tweaked to make the game look exactly how they want it to be.

The only complaint that players generally have is that this tried-and-tested mod does not deliver on the FPS department. While OptiFine definitely improves the smoothness of the game, its primary competitor (Sodium) gives players more FPS.

Additionally, this mod is not yet available for the recently released update. Although developers have only released pre-release versions of this mod, their competitors released the updated mod the day the Minecraft 1.19 update was released.

Sodium mod

Sodium is another brilliant graphics and performance mod that has quickly gained significant popularity. Despite being comparatively newer, many players have opted for this mod simply because of the amount of FPS it gives them. Even when players set their render distance at 20, an average PC can easily output at least 60 FPS.

The only downside to the mod is that it does not offer native support for shaders, which is why users will have to download the Iris mod with the Sodium to run shaders. However, it does not have ultra-zoom, dynamic lighting, live FPS counters, or other features like its competitor. All these features will need a separate mod that works with Sodium.

One major plus point about this mod is that it is readily available for Minecraft 1.19 update. Fortunately, this mod’s team of developers were quick to release the updated version on the same day The Wild Update dropped for everyone.

Changelog