Sodium

This version contains a countless number of improvements and bug fixes, and is the largest update to Sodium since the initial release.

Highlights

• This is the first multi-loader release for both NeoForge and Fabric! Yes, seriously!
  • In the long-term, this means that users and mod authors will no longer need to rely on third-party forks of Sodium (Rubidium, Embeddium, Xenon, etc). This will greatly reduce friction for everyone, and improve the overall user experience significantly.
  • We are working with mod authors as quickly as possible to implement additional APIs to improve mod compatibility with this version. Where possible, we will try to submit patches upstream to other mods to minimize the effort needed. If you are a mod author who finds their mod no longer works with Sodium 0.6, please open an issue so that we can work with you to fix it.
• The Fabric Rendering API (FRAPI) is now supported out of the box! This greatly improves mod compatibility, and makes it so mods like Indium are no longer necessary. We've worked with individuals in the Fabric team and other mod authors to make sure our implementation works correctly, and have done comprehensive testing to ensure other mods behave correctly with our implementation. (That said, if you find a bug with it as a mod author, please let us know.)
• Major improvements for translucent blocks! You know the long-standing issues with stained glass and other blocks, and how they don't quite look right? We're happy to announce those issues are no more. This means that translucent blocks will look great-- much better than Vanilla even-- with almost no performance impact. (This achievement would not have been possible without the effort of Douira. This was such a complex issue that it became the subject of their master's thesis.)

Other changes

• The quality of terrain rendering has been greatly improved (greater vertex/texture precision), fixing many issues with special block models.
• The graphical fidelity and performance of cloud rendering has been improved significantly.
• Error messages at startup are more helpful now, especially when showing errors about incompatible graphics drivers.
• Reduced the overhead of framebuffer copies, improving performance slightly on integrated graphics.
• Fixed a bug that would cause z-fighting between fluids and some special blocks (such as Stairs and Slabs.)
• Added support for modifying the alpha component of vertex colors in terrain rendering, as used by some mods.
• Improved compatibility with mods that use custom fluid renderers.
• Improved compatibility with mods that use custom biome colors.
• Improved compatibility with mods that extend the entity renderer.
• Fixed an issue where some chunks would not render correctly immediately after the projection matrix was changed (such as when putting down a Spyglass.)
• Fixed an issue where mods relying on FREX Flawless Frames (such as ReplayMod) would have a one-frame delay before chunks were rendered to the screen.
• Added a workaround for users who have installed ASUS GPU Tweak III on their computer, since it causes extremely poor performance and crashes with Minecraft.
• Fixed a crash at startup with ARM CPUs on Windows that don't support OpenGL without the use of a translation layer.
• The rendering of some options in the video settings menu has been slightly improved.
• And many other improvements...