Request Description

I’m seeing lower FPS than expected while playing Minecraft 1.16.5 with the Sodium mod. The performance issues become especially noticeable in large builds or areas with lots of textures. Since my friend can only play up to 1.16.5 due to their hardware (an i3 2nd gen processor), I’m also sticking with this version. I’m looking for suggestions on how to improve FPS and overall performance in this setup.

Steps to Reproduce:

Start Minecraft 1.16.5.
Create a new world and open the F3 menu.
Notice the FPS drops and stuttering, especially in detailed or large areas.
Expected Behavior: I’d like to see stable and higher FPS, even when the game gets demanding.

Actual Behavior: The game experiences noticeable FPS drops and stuttering.

Environment:

Minecraft Version: 1.16.5
Mod: Sodium
My Specs:

Device: Chromebook C204M
CPU: Intel Celeron N4000
GPU: Intel UHD Graphics 600 with OpenGL 4.5 support
RAM: 4 GB
Friend's Specs:

CPU: Intel i3 2nd Gen (supports up to OpenGL 2.1)
Hard Drive: 1 TB (slow)
RAM: 6 GB
Suggestions:

Optimize Chunk Loading: Look into making chunk loading more efficient, like dynamic rendering based on player view or LOD for distant chunks.

Improve Entity Handling: Enhance how entities are processed, especially in areas with many mobs or complex redstone, by batching updates or optimizing calculations.

Memory Management: Work on better memory management to reduce RAM usage, focusing on background tasks and garbage collection to free up resources for rendering.

Customizable Render Settings: Add more options to Sodium for tweaking render settings, like shadow quality, entity render distance, and particle effects, to help with performance.

Threaded Rendering: Consider supporting multi-threaded rendering to use multiple CPU cores, improving smoothness and FPS.

Mod Compatibility Enhancements: Ensure Sodium works well with other performance mods like OptiFine and Rubidium to avoid conflicts and make the most of optimizations And we don’t talk about me using a Chromebook.

A backport to such an old version is not on the table. It is too much work for us, and mods don't get updated on those versions anymore. There are better solutions available for running modern versions of Minecraft on such hardware, such as:

• Use a lightweight Linux distribution (Xubuntu, for example) that will have up-to-date drivers installed out of the box. This will also improve your performance a lot.
• Use a mod which downgrades the OpenGL version requirement (see here) on newer versions of Minecraft. This should work at least for Vanilla, but it's not guaranteed to work with Sodium. You will just have to try and see.

Thanks