Minecraft performance mods

Performance mods are not magic.

Good ones

There are a few extremely well-made, high-impact mods which are shoo-ins to every modpack. They makes the game faster with virtually no observable changes to the game.

Off the top of my head: Sodium, Lithium, FerriteCore, ModernFix. There are others.

Situational ones

There are more topical performance mods. A tradeoff is involved which may or may not be appropriate for your modpack and your tastes.

Sometimes mod pages are not clear about the ramifications of an “optimization”. Does it optimize a game feature by making its code more efficient, or by preventing it from working correctly?

Maybe you can tolerate model pop-in when you walk around corners, so “entity culling” is fine. Maybe combat just isn’t that important in your pack, so mods that slow down AI ticking are okay.

I mean, there is plenty of value in these mods - If Lithium speeds up game logic while maintaining vanilla parity, then you can win back even more by “cheating” and ignoring vanilla parity where it makes sense. Just know what you’re installing.

Snake oil

There are plenty of low-quality performance mods that technically optimize the game but in ways that don’t matter.

• Poor mod-compat because the authors take a hacksaw to whatever they want even if other mods use it.
• Sometimes the authors clearly do not have Java perf experience.

I think some developers (correctly!) sumrised that making an “optimization” mod is a really good way to get am awful lot of downloads from people who don’t know any better.

Canned air

There are mods where “whether this even does anything at all” is a hotly debated topic (memoryleakfix…)

Outright lies

Remember that one which “increased your FPS” by just presenting the same exact frame to the monitor 5 times in a row, and counting that as 5 unique frames for purposes of the FPS counter?

Good times.

Prevention is the best medicine

• Turn off shaders.
• Turn off HD / animated texture packs.
• Remove or tone down mods with complicated rendering effects.
• Lower your monitor resolution.
• Lower your render and simulation distance, even by only 2 or 3 chunks.
• Close web browsers and Electron programs.
• Double-check you’re using the right video card.
• Double-check you allocated enough memory to the JVM.
• Use an updated version of Java, if possible, and do not bog it down with bad flags.

and, of course,

• Lower your standards. Minecraft performs like shit; it’s fine.