Sodium video settings - pajicadvance/sodium-fabric GitHub Wiki

Sodium comes with a revamped video settings menu. All of the menu options are explained via in-game tooltips when you hover over them, so they are not explained here; instead, this guide provides additional info and gives advice on which options you should change or leave untouched.

General

• Render Distance

  Default value is 12. Sodium is optimized well for high render distances, so you can try increasing the value if you have a decent graphics card. Similarly, low end graphics cards and integrated graphics will benefit greatly from decreasing the value.

• Simulation Distance

  Unless you know exactly what you're doing, there's not much of a reason to have this option set to anything higher than 12. You can try decreasing the value to squeeze out more performance, but make sure it's not set below 8.

• VSync and Max Framerate

  Unless you need minimal input latency, there is no reason not to limit your framerate. Running the game at an uncapped framerate unnecessarily increases the load and power consumption of your graphics card, which can be especially problematic on laptops. If your display supports adaptive sync, turn VSync off and set the max framerate 3-4 FPS lower than your monitor's refresh rate. If not, the only option is to turn on VSync for a tear-free experience. You can turn VSync off and limit your framerate with the max framerate option even if you don't have adaptive sync, but you're likely to experience screen tearing.

Quality

• Biome Blend

  Default value is 2. This is different compared to vanilla's default of 5. The reason for this is that Sodium uses a much more efficient and better looking blending algorithm, so not only does Sodium's value of 2 perform better than vanilla's value of 5, it also looks better. There is not much of a reason to increase the value beyond 2, as higher values provide little to no visual improvement for the performance loss caused. The performance impact of the improved blending algorithm is low, so there's no need to disable it unless you're trying to run the game on a very low spec PC.

• Mipmap Levels

  Default value is 4x. Mipmaps generally have a low performance impact. The only weak point is having a lot of animated textures active at once, but Sodium alleviates this by only animating textures which are visible to the player, so preferably this option should be left at the default value, unless you have to squeeze every last drop of performance.

The other options under the Quality tab should really only be toned down as a last resort for gaining performance on low end systems.

Performance

• Chunk Update Threads

  The amount of threads allocated for chunk updates is either thread count / 3 or thread count - 6, whichever is higher. You can also refer to the table below for the most common cases.

  Available Threads	Used Threads
  1 thread	1 thread
  2 threads	1 thread
  4 threads	2 threads
  6 threads	3 threads
  8 threads	3 threads
  12 threads	6 threads
  16+ threads	10 threads

Unless you know exactly what you're doing, the options in the Performance tab should be left to default.

Advanced

The options in this tab should be left at default in almost every scenario.