What Sodium Does
Sodium is a rendering engine replacement mod for Minecraft, built to cut down on micro-stutter and lift frame rates. But it also aims to fix a number of graphical issues found in the base game, and it's designed for wide compatibility with other mods rather than fighting them, so you generally don't have to give up your usual mod list to get the benefit.
Client and Server Requirements
Sodium is required on the client. The server side is unsupported, since Sodium only changes how your own game renders frames on your machine. If you run a dedicated server, there is nothing from this mod to install there.
Loaders and Minecraft Versions
Sodium supports the Fabric and NeoForge mod loaders. On its Modrinth listing it's marked compatible with Minecraft 26.3, 1.21.11, and the 26.3-rc-1 and 26.3-rc-2 release candidates. Look, these are separate, specific builds rather than a continuous span of versions, so if you are on a different build of the game, check the project page before assuming it will work.
Hardware and Driver Requirements
Sodium officially supports graphics cards with drivers compatible with OpenGL 4.5 or newer. That covers most cards released in roughly the last decade, including Intel HD Graphics 500 Series (Skylake) or newer, Nvidia GeForce 400 Series (Fermi) or newer, and AMD Radeon HD 7000 Series (GCN 1) or newer. Devices that rely on OpenGL translation layers, such as GL4ES or ANGLE, aren't supported and will run into severe performance issues.
Recent Update
The most recent repository release, Sodium 0.9.2, ported the mod to Minecraft 26.3. Along with the port, it re-enabled the fullscreen resolution control on Linux, fixed a memory leak tied to recreating resources in the F3 debug overlay, and fixed a bug affecting falling blocks. If you run Iris alongside Sodium, note that Iris hadn't yet caught up to this release, so updating Sodium first could break your shader setup until Iris follows.
Category and License
On Modrinth, Sodium is categorized under Performance. It is released under the Polyform Shield license, by the developer jellysquid3.
