How Sodium became a better Minecraft performance mod than OptiFine

Modified Mar 27, 2025 10:00 GMT

Sodium gradually overtook OptiFine in becoming the best performance mod for Minecraft. (Image via Sportskeeda Gaming/Mojang Studios || Modrinth/Sodium || OptiFine) — Sodium has gradually overtook OptiFine to become the best performance mod for Minecraft (Image via Sportskeeda Gaming/Mojang Studios || Modrinth/Sodium || OptiFine)

Sodium and OptiFine are considered two of the most popular performance mods for Minecraft. They are known for improving chunk rendering and simplifying internal game computing in order to squeeze more FPS for Mojang's sandbox. Players have frequently experienced a massive jump in FPS after using these performance mods.

In recent times, however, it is safe to say that Sodium has overtaken OptiFine in terms of performance and updating their mod for the latest Minecraft versions. An argument can be made that, as of now, Sodium is a much better performance mod than OptiFine, even though the former does not offer some features that the latter does.

Reasons why Sodium is a better Minecraft performance mod than OptiFine

Sodium keeps up with new Minecraft versions

Sodium is already out for Minecraft 1.21.5, while OptiFine is only 35% developed (Image via Iris Shaders/Sodium || Discord/OptiFine)

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Despite Minecraft being more than 15 years old, Mojang continues to update the title and add new features to it. Every time the developers update the game, the modding community has to work on their mod to make it compatible with the latest game version. This can be a tedious task, especially now since Mojang is releasing frequent game drops rather than yearly major updates.

For a while, both Sodium's and OptiFine's mods kept up with the game versions. In recent times, however, OptiFine has lagged, while Sodium continues to release new compatible versions almost immediately.

After the most recent Minecraft 1.21.5 Spring to Life update, Iris Shaders and Sodium mod were ready with their compatible mod version in a day or two.

However, OptiFine seemed to be way behind schedule. According to information from their official Discord channel, OptiFine's 1.21.5 compatible mod version is only 35% into development. At the time of writing this article, not even a single preview mod version for 1.21.5 is available on OptiFine's official website.

This clearly shows that Sodium is keeping up with game updates, while OptiFine has fallen behind quite a bit.

Sodium offers more performance than OptiFine

OptiFine is one of the oldest Minecraft performance mods in the modding space. It was available even before the game was officially released in 2011. Hence, for many years, OptiFine was considered a staple in the performance modding scene.

Despite only arriving in 2020, Sodiunm had modern technology and tricks up its sleeve. Gradually, it became clear that Sodium was squeezing more FPS out-of-the-box compared to OptiFine. Hence, many players started shifting to the new performance mod.

While OptiFine still has a strong following, because of the massive performance difference, Sodium, along with Iris Shaders, has lured the majority of the player base.

Simply put, Sodium is a much more optimized performance mod than OptiFine. Hence, it has gradually become equally popular, if not more, in the Minecraft modding scene.

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Edited by Abhishek Manikandan