I got tired of OpenGL being OpenGL. So I built this.
VulkanMod core. Full engine swap — OpenGL 3.2 out, Vulkan 1.2 in. Not a wrapper. Not Sodium with extra steps. Actual renderer replacement.
Runs on Xwayland not native Wayland. If you're on X11 it'll work there too.
Probably works on Windows 11 (or 10).
The numbers
Tested on my daily driver:
| FPS | Vulkan Optimized | Sodium | Vanilla |
|---|---|---|---|
| AVG | 2370 | 1405 | 1007 |
| 1% | 1356 | 859 | 620 |
| 0.1% | 1029 | 699 | 520 |
| Power draw | 52.7W | 46.5W | 44.5W |
| FPS/W (AVG) | 44.97 | 30.22 | 22.63 |
+68% over Sodium. +135% over vanilla. And yeah, it pulls more watts — because it's actually using the GPU instead of letting the CPU bottleneck everything. It will probably more power efficient on vsync or fixed fps scenario. see the Gallery for more information.
My rig
- CPU: Ryzen 5 5600X @ 4.65 GHz
- GPU: RX 9060 XT 16GB
- RAM: 32 GB
- OS: Alpine Linux 3.24
- Kernel: 7.1.3-0-stable
- Display: KWin (Wayland) → Xwayland
- JVM:
-Xmx6G -Xms6G -XX:+UseZGC -XX:+AlwaysPreTouch
Note: This test is using Prism Launcher on flatpak environment. You will probably gain more fps if you run it natively.
What's in the pack
VulkanMod. That's it for rendering. No Sodium, no OptiFine, no Canvas — they're all OpenGL rewrites and they fight with VulkanMod.
Everything else is curated for compatibility. No bloat. If it doesn't work with VulkanMod, it's not here.
Heads up
- Shader packs won't work. VulkanMod's shader support is improving but it's not OptiFine.
- Fabric only. No Forge version, don't ask.
- If you're on NVIDIA, your mileage may vary. AMD's where this shines.
That's it. Download it or don't. The numbers are above if you need convincing.