This is the first official release of Sodium for Minecraft, my free and open-source rendering engine replacement for the client that greatly improves frame rates, reduces micro-stutter, and fixes graphical issues in Minecraft. It boasts wide compatibility with the Fabric mod ecosystem when compared to other mods and doesn't compromise on how the game looks, giving you that authentic block game feel.

Note: 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.
Features

Features

• 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 bottlenecked by the GPU or other components.

• Multi-threaded chunk updates for nearby block and light changes, greatly reducing lag caused by interacting with the world. (before, after)

• Many optimizations for chunk loading and block rendering, making chunk loading significantly faster and less damaging to frame rates. (before, after)

• Many optimizations for both mob and block entity rendering, reducing the CPU overhead and greatly improving frame rates when you get carried away placing too many chests in one room.

• More efficient chunk mesh building, greatly reducing the game's memory consumption and allocation rate when loading chunks, which in turn reduces lag spikes caused by garbage collector activity.

• Many graphical fixes for lighting issues. 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, providing greatly improved graphical quality that is significantly less computationally intensive. (comparison)

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

Installation

Make sure you have the latest version of Fabric Loader present and then simply copy the mod into your mods folder. No other mods or additional setup (not even Fabric API!) is required. You do not want the -dev or -sources files below! Make sure you're grabbing sodium-fabric-mc1.16.1-0.1.0.jar or clicking this download link.

You do not need to create new worlds in order to take advantage of the mod.