I really love the way sprinklers look when they work, but if you have too many of them at one place it turns in to a lag-fest. I know about the setting in the config option, but they lose their charm when they don't have any particles at all.

My suggestion is to have a second sprinkler which looks exactly the same but it doesn't show any particles when it works.

So, let's say you have 10 sprinklers which are close to each other, you can have 5 sprinkles which generate particles and 5 which do not.

Then just keep the particles turned off?

Is there a way to tone down the particles? I noticed this problem as well. I added agricraft to a Stoneblock 2 pack and I have 4 farm rooms with 4 sprinklers each. With particles on, I get sub 40 frames most of the time. With particles off, I max out my frames and the sprinklers seem to have little or no impact to my performance.

Perhaps a minimal setting or something as well for the particles that just tones down how many render or something?

I am 95% certain this is specifically an Optifine setting as I always manually install it as well, but there is a setting under Video Settings -> Animation Settings for Particles that can be All, Decreased, Minimal, so maybe make Agricraft also respect that as well? So if you turn down particles there, also turn them down for the Sprinklers? Then you do not need to restart your game to get the setting to take effect.

Or another suggestion, maybe make it so the particles only render if the player is a very narrow range around them? Like maybe a 1 or 2 chunk radius. Or even make it so they need line of sight for them to render them (cull the particles if there is a wall in the way). That way adding multiple sprinklers in a large area would not have a compounded effect. I am not sure how easy that would be to do with Minecraft's rendering pipeline though.

While the particles cause overhead, having many growth ticks causing a lot of render updates creates a lot more.
A different kind of sprinkler would not change this.

Hmm, maybe finding a way to cut down on the render updates while still boosting growth?

I did test it, 4 sprinklers with particles on lower my fps quite a lot. 4 sprinklers with particles off - fps is normal.

Then just keep the particles turned off?

As I said earlier:

I know about the setting in the config option, but they lose their charm when they don't have any particles at all.

Closing since we are moving to 1.16.