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Driver Compatibility
Many issues with Sodium are caused by out-of-date, incompatible, or broken graphics drivers. This page contains a list of known graphics cards with broken drivers, along with how you can fix compatibility issues with them. As per usual, most things can be fixed simply by upgrading your graphics drivers.
Note
This problem is now resolved in Sodium 0.5.0 and newer (for Minecraft 1.20.1+). You can safely ignore this section if you are using a newer version, since it will automatically apply the workarounds for you.
The latest versions of the NVIDIA graphics driver will forcefully enable a software hack called "Threaded Optimizations" when it detects Minecraft. Despite the name, these optimizations only cause severe performance issues and crashes when Sodium is installed. Even when they work correctly (which is rare), they do not improve performance.
To workaround the problem, you must modify your launcher and/or system configuration to prevent the NVIDIA drivers from detecting the presence of Minecraft. Because of how the detection logic varies between Windows and Linux, the steps are slightly different between the two operating systems.
Important
Before doing anything, you must ensure the latest NVIDIA Graphics Driver (version 536.23 or newer) is installed!
The only solution is to use a third-party launcher which is known to not be detected by the drivers (such as Prism Launcher, which we strongly recommend).
Warning
Using either the official Minecraft launcher or the CurseForge launcher will not work! There is a very low chance that launchers besides Prism Launcher will work correctly, because most launchers will purposefully announce that they are, in fact, running Minecraft.
You must set the environment variable __GL_THREADED_OPTIMIZATIONS to 0 in order to workaround the problem on Linux systems.
Tip
The Arch Linux wiki provides a general overview of how you can do this, but the exact steps you should take will depend on how your launcher was installed, and the Linux distribution you are using.
If you are using Prism Launcher, then you can simply set the "wrapper command" within your instance's settings to env __GL_THREADED_OPTIMIZATIONS=0.
Older versions of Sodium do not work correctly on these graphics cards, resulting in an empty world where no chunks or blocks are rendered. You must upgrade to Sodium 0.4.10 or newer to resolve the problem.
For more information, see the GitHub issue found here.
The game will not render correctly when using recent versions of Mesa/Linux, and you may experience hard lock-ups or crashes of the entire computer when attempting to run Minecraft with Sodium installed.
We do not know of a guaranteed way to fix this problem. You can try using the Zink graphics driver (an OpenGL-on-Vulkan implementation) with recent versions of Mesa, but you may find that performance is much worse.
For more information on this problem, please see the GitHub issue.
Important
When upgrading the Intel graphics driver, you must download and install the driver update from Intel's website. You cannot use Windows Update or Device Manager to install updates.
You must have driver version 15.33.53.5161 or newer installed, as the drivers which Windows 10 installs automatically are not compatible with Sodium and will cause the game to freeze or crash at startup. You will need to install an updated driver using the instructions found here.
On some computers, you may encounter issues where chunks will "flicker" in and out of existence when placing or breaking blocks. This problem can be fixed by installing the latest drivers for your GPU.