Nvidium-vk

Nvidium-vk brings Nvidium, the GPU-driven terrain renderer for Sodium, to NeoForge and to Minecraft's Vulkan backend. It replaces Sodium's terrain rendering on NVIDIA graphics cards: the whole world's geometry stays in video memory, the GPU itself decides what is visible (mesh shaders, occlusion culling against last frame's depth, one indirect draw for all terrain), and large render distances run at frame rates vanilla Sodium cannot reach.

This is a fork of Nvidium by Cortex, which is published under the LGPL-3.0 license that permits forks. Nvidium-vk keeps the same license, credits the original author, and is maintained independently. Everything below describes this fork.

What is different from the original Nvidium

• NeoForge instead of Fabric. The original mod targets Fabric; Nvidium-vk is built for NeoForge 26.2 and the NeoForge build of Sodium.
• A Vulkan backend. The original renders only through OpenGL with NVIDIA-specific extensions. Minecraft 26.x can run on a Vulkan renderer, where those extensions do not exist; Nvidium-vk adds a second rendering backend built on VK_EXT_mesh_shader and buffer device addresses that plugs into Mojang's own Vulkan renderer. Both backends are included; the mod picks the one the game is running on.
• Smaller video memory footprint. The terrain arena starts small and grows on demand instead of claiming most of the free video memory at start-up.
• Verified on both backends with the Vulkan validation layers, a memory soak test and benchmarks (see the numbers below).

Requirements

• An NVIDIA graphics card, Turing (GTX 16xx / RTX 20xx) or newer, with a current driver. Both backends need mesh shaders; the OpenGL backend also needs NVIDIA-only OpenGL extensions. The mod does not run on AMD or Intel graphics and disables itself there.
• Minecraft 26.2 with NeoForge 26.2.0.93.
• Sodium 0.9.2+mc26.2 (NeoForge build), as a required dependency.
• To use the Vulkan backend, select Vulkan in Minecraft's Video Settings. The mod neoloadingvulkanfix is recommended there to avoid a start-up issue with NeoForge's loading screen.

Installation and use

Put the Nvidium-vk jar into mods/ next to Sodium. There is nothing to configure: at start-up the mod checks the graphics card and the active graphics backend and writes Enabling Nvidium (or the missing requirement) to the log. In the F3 debug screen the right column shows Using nvidium renderer together with the GPU time of each rendering pass. Nvidium-vk's own options (video memory limit, fog, translucency sorting, statistics) are on the Nvidium page of Sodium's video settings.

Performance

Measured on an RTX 3070 Laptop at 1600×900 with vsync off, same world and camera for every row:

With Distant Horizons (LOD radius 128, render distance 32): Vulkan with Sodium 286 FPS, with Nvidium-vk 303 FPS. The mod is made for large render distances; at render distance 16 its fixed per-frame work does not pay off.

Known limitations

• NVIDIA graphics cards only, by design.
• Pinned to NeoForge 26.2.0.93 and Sodium 0.9.2: the mod hooks into internals of both; other versions are untested and may fail to load.
• Shader packs (Iris) disable the mod, as in the original.
• Changing the statistics level takes effect after a renderer reload.

Reporting problems

Questions and bug reports: please open an issue on GitHub (link below). Include logs/latest.log, the graphics backend you use (OpenGL or Vulkan) and your driver version.

Original mod: Nvidium by Cortex, LGPL-3.0.