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Minecraft is no stranger to mods. While the title was still in beta, and before it featured any official multiplayer, the community was taking the game’s code and editing it to add multiplayer features.
With mods like RLCraft, modern options can often change so much of the game’s code that Minecraft feels like an entirely different experience, and using shaders can make the game look as new and fresh as mods make it feel.
While some choices, such as Optifine, have more than a decade of history to them, there are also newcomers to the scene, such as Iris and Sodium, which aim to do what Optifine does, but better. This begs the question, though, is one of these options better than the other for players using shaders?
Comparing Minecraft's Optifine and Iris: Features, convenience, and more explored
Optifine
Optifine is a name that needs almost no introduction in the Minecraft community. Its first version, under the name Optifine, was released all the way back in Beta 1.7.3 that was released on July 8, 2011. This means that Optifine has been a go-to mod for more than 11 years.
Optifine is best known for its support of shaders for the game, but this is not the only thing that the mod contains. It also harbors features such as time control, configurable animations and details, chunk loading control, FPS control, connect textures, clear water, better snow, better grass, random mobs, fog control, variable render distance, dynamic lighting, and HD texture support, among others.
Iris
In some ways, comparing Iris to Optifine is an unfair comparison for Optifine. The major reason is that as available today, Iris' installer automatically installs Sodium as well, making the two effectively the same mod, as they are a package deal by default.
In a one-on-one comparison, Iris would have much more trouble competing with Optifine. The latter has stability that comes with its old code-base, whereas Iris has more experimental features such as Shadow Frustum Culling, and more efficient entity rendering that can improve frames by up to 60% in entity-heavy worlds.
Iris is open-source, which allows the entire community to work together to make it better.
However, with Sodium bundled in, the comparison becomes much less fair. Sodium aims to rewrite large portions of Minecraft’s vanilla rendering engine, optimizing performance in a way that no other mods have ever done before. It works like a treat as it often increases FPS by double digits.
Which one is better?
Iris and Sodium aretwo different mods that work together. Since both need to get updated independently for their advantage to be maintained, there is a case to be made that Optifine is the more stable, and therefore the better option for players to use.
Despite the potential for instability, the combination of Iris and Sodium is the better choice by far for players who want to use shaders in Minecraft. It has been reported for years that Iris and Sodium regularly offer better frame rates, with and without shaders.
And with Iris’ development team aiming to run every shader that Optifine can, it will become more common as time goes on.
However, which option is better will depend on the player’s hardware. This means that while many report having better frame rates with Iris and Sodium, that does not guarantee that everyone will experience the same. Players should experiment with the two options to see which offers better results for their hardware.
