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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Many issues with Sodium are caused by out-of-date, incompatible, or broken graphics drivers.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.
Important
You should NEVER use Windows Update or Device Manager to search for updated graphics drivers. This includes any other "utility" that offers to install the drivers for you (such as Intel's Driver Support Assistant). You should ALWAYS download the drivers for your hardware from the original manufacturer's website (NVIDIA, AMD, Intel).
Some older versions of the NVIDIA Graphics Driver are known to not work correctly with Sodium. You must update your graphics drivers to version 536.23 (or newer) in order to solve this problem. The game will refuse to launch if you have an older version installed, and this check cannot be disabled.
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.
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.
If you are using Prism Launcher, then you can do this simply by modifying the "Environment Variables" options under your instance's settings.
Otherwise, 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. Note that you should configure this environment variable only for Minecraft, and not globally.
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.
Some older versions of Mesa (v23.1.1 through v24.0.3) have bugs which cause the game to not render correctly and sometimes even crash the entire system. Mesa v24.0.4 fixes the regression and allows for normal functioning again. You may need to update your system to get the latest versions of Mesa.
For more information on this problem, please see the GitHub issue.
List of affected CPU models found here.
Also known as "Intel HD Graphics 2500" and "Intel HD Graphics 4000" on 3rd Generation Intel CPUs.
You must have driver version 10.18.10.5161 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. This problem can only be fixed by installing the latest drivers from here.
List of affected CPU models found here.
Also known as "Intel UHD Graphics" and "Intel Iris Plus Graphics" on 10th Generation Intel CPUs.
On some computers, you may encounter issues where parts of the world "flicker" when placing or breaking blocks. This is caused by a graphics driver bug, and can only be fixed by installing the latest drivers from here.