This is the first major release of Sodium since launch, so there are nearly a year's worth of improvements and bug fixes in this one! Hardware support has been greatly improved, and there's been many new optimizations to help out everyone.
Highlights
- Added a new and optimized system for vertex writing. Depending on the situation, significant performance improvements can be seen for both block entity rendering, mob rendering, and text rendering.
- Improved hardware support for AMD and Intel GPUs on Windows, allowing the use of multi-draw rendering where it was otherwise broken in the past. Multi-draw chunk rendering can drastically improve frame rates where supported.
- Switched to using the new ThinGL library, which allows Sodium code to use a stateless abstraction over OpenGL. This helps to improve performance, mod compatibility, stability, and future compatibility with Minecraft 1.17.
- Preparing chunk updates for rendering now takes much less time by better taking advantage of multi-threading, greatly improving frame times while loading or updating chunks.
- Many new optimizations for our chunk graph and culling algorithm, helping to reduce CPU load and improve frame rates while playing.
- Improved compatibility with many mods depending on additional block data to be available during chunk building, such as LambdaBetterGrass.
- Added an API other mods can use to disable Sodium features. Sometimes, incompatibilities can arise, but mods supporting this functionality can ask Sodium to disable specific parts of itself automatically to avoid these.
- Fixed large memory leaks that could occur when unloading and loading many worlds repeatedly.
- Fixed terrain stitching issues caused by high-resolution texture packs and exotic block models.
- Fixed some issues with smooth block and entity lighting, notably with emissive properties.
- Fixed issues where the top-face of fluids would disappear at certain camera angle, or while inside a fluid.
- Fixed many issues causing chunks not to update or appear when looking in certain directions.
- Issues with render distance and fog effects when using certain mods have been fixed.
... and much, much more.
You can find a number of issues that were fixed with this release here. For the complete list of changes, you can review the Git commit log here.