Sodium

Before you install Sodium, read the Driver Compatibility page to prevent crashes and poor performance. Sodium exists on multiple mod loaders, but for a nice lightweight experience, we suggest using Fabric Loader. Most third-party launchers have functionality to automatically install mod loaders, so feel free to use those if you'd like. Once your mod loader has installed drop Sodium into your mods folder.

• Configuration: Sodium automatically enables all optimisations supported by your system for the best experience. If needed, you can fiddle with video settings affecting performance and features that are more advanced.
• Additional Performance: Sodium focuses on optimizing Minecraft's rendering code. To achieve further performance gains, use additional mods such as Lithium for MC 1.15+, and Phosphor for MC <1.19, which optimize other aspects of the game.

Sodium greatly enhances Minecraft's performance by rewriting the majority of the game's code responsible for rendering its world. As a matter of fact, it's going to replace the vanilla rendering code with a way more sophisticated implementation based on modern rendering techniques. Geometry batching and consolidation of draw passes upon rendering chunks are used; this greatly reduces CPU processing concerning the rendering of the world. Sodium acts more like a rendering engine rather than an optimization-only mod.

Also, Sodium includes a much more efficient way of formatting the world geometries, reducing video memory usage for chunks by about 40%. A second culling pass removes geometry that is facing away from the camera yet otherwise inside the viewing frustum. This greatly reduces the load on the GPU from processing geometry that isn't visible. Overall, this helps reduce the video memory bandwidth requirements and alleviates one of the major bottlenecks in the game's performance.