Onyx

A modern performance engine for Minecraft

Onyx is a next-generation performance engine, built from the ground up for modern versions of the game. It doesn't change how Minecraft works — it changes how much work Minecraft wastes.

Instead of trimming detail or cutting visual corners, Onyx attacks the enormous amount of effort the client spends every frame on things that never reach your screen. It is engineered around a single, uncompromising rule:

If vanilla would render it, Onyx renders it. If vanilla would simulate it, Onyx simulates it.

No missing entities. No broken farms. No altered mechanics. No visual shortcuts. No gameplay compromises. Just a dramatically faster client.

Where most optimization mods specialize in one subsystem, Onyx unifies visibility culling, geometry caching, lighting optimization, a modern GPU terrain pipeline, memory improvements, and deep compatibility work into one engine — all in service of preserving complete vanilla behavior while sharply reducing both CPU and GPU load.

Design philosophy

Performance is only valuable when it's invisible.

Every optimization in Onyx has to clear five bars before it ships:

Principle	What it means
Visual parity	Every visible pixel matches vanilla output, exactly.
Gameplay integrity	Rendering optimizations never touch simulation.
Measurable gains	Every feature must prove a real improvement under profiling and benchmarks.
Compatibility first	Large modpacks should keep working, unmodified, wherever technically possible.
Stability over speed	An optimization that costs you stability isn't an optimization.

These five rules shape every line of the project.

What makes Onyx different

Minecraft spends a surprising amount of time on work that has no effect on the final image on your screen. Objects sealed behind walls are still processed. Geometry is rebuilt over and over. The same lighting values are queried again and again. Draw work is handed to the GPU in thousands of tiny batches.

Individually, none of it is expensive. Together, it quietly eats your frame rate — and it gets dramatically worse in exactly the worlds people care about most: sprawling storage rooms, mob farms, and dense technical builds.

Onyx removes that overhead with a set of carefully engineered systems, each one built to delete unnecessary work while keeping behavior and visuals identical to vanilla. The payoff is higher frame rates, lower frame times, and noticeably smoother gameplay where it counts.

Benchmarks

Every result below comes from an automated in-game benchmark suite. Each scene is rendered under identical conditions — same hardware, same world, same render distance, same camera, same measurement window — across vanilla, Sodium, and Onyx. Performance is captured across average FPS, average and 95th-percentile frame times, 1% lows, memory usage, and garbage-collection activity, because FPS alone never tells the whole story.

Scenario	Vanilla	Sodium	Onyx
Hidden storage base	703 FPS	979 FPS	2,114 FPS
Mixed mob crowd	662 FPS	840 FPS	1,857 FPS
Item field (400 items)	1,124 FPS	2,079 FPS	2,043 FPS
Particle storm	607 FPS	766 FPS	752 FPS
Terrain vista	2,282 FPS	2,267 FPS	2,207 FPS
Base interior	707 FPS	1,043 FPS	801 FPS

The pattern is clear and worth being honest about: Onyx pulls far ahead in dense survival environments — hidden storage, entity crowds, block-entity-heavy bases — often running around twice as fast as Sodium and up to three times vanilla. In long-distance open-terrain rendering, Sodium's mature engine still leads. That's a difference in engineering priorities, not a simple winner — and closing the terrain gap is exactly what upcoming versions are for.

Rendering architecture

Conservative visibility determination

Onyx's biggest wins come from proving what you can't see. Before rendering an entity or block entity, Onyx tests whether it's completely hidden behind opaque geometry. If an object is mathematically proven invisible, it's skipped. If there's any uncertainty at all, it's rendered exactly as vanilla would render it.

The system never guesses. It either proves an object is hidden, or it draws it — which is what makes the visual output identical.

Visibility cache

Recomputing those decisions every frame would waste the very time Onyx is trying to save. So it caches each verdict and only recomputes when something that could actually change visibility does — the camera moves, an entity moves, or a nearby block updates. Everything else keeps riding cached results, which is what collapses the cost of a busy storage room or a deep base to almost nothing.

Lighting cache

Lighting lookups are another quiet expense. Rather than asking the light engine for the same values every frame, Onyx caches lighting and invalidates it only when a nearby world change can actually affect it. Because light can only change through specific block updates, the output stays identical while thousands of redundant lookups per second simply disappear.

Geometry caching

Many block entities rebuild the exact same geometry every single frame. Onyx tessellates that stable geometry once, stores it compactly, and replays it until something genuinely changes. Anything that animates automatically drops back to the vanilla path — so the visuals are identical, and the CPU stops doing the same work on repeat.

Modern terrain pipeline

Terrain rendering is rebuilt around modern GPU practice:

Multi-draw command batching
Far fewer draw calls
Compact vertex formats
Lower GPU memory bandwidth
Smarter chunk-rebuild scheduling
Reduced CPU–GPU synchronization

Together these cut CPU overhead and improve GPU utilization — without changing a pixel of the rendered result.

Compatibility

Performance should never cost you compatibility. Onyx is built to coexist with the wider Fabric ecosystem wherever technically possible, with particular care taken around rendering, networking, and gameplay mods. It has been tested running alongside projects such as Iris, Lithium, FerriteCore, and Krypton.

When another mod takes ownership of a subsystem, Onyx's affected features step aside automatically — graceful interoperability instead of crashes.

Gameplay integrity

This one is non-negotiable, and it's enforced by automated tests on every build: Onyx preserves Minecraft's simulation exactly.

Hidden entities keep ticking. Mob farms keep spawning. Redstone fires identically. Hoppers keep moving items. Villagers keep pathfinding. Crop growth, animal breeding, and every other gameplay system behave precisely as they would in vanilla.

Onyx only changes what the renderer chooses to send to the GPU. It never changes how your world behaves.

This is version 0.1.0 — and it's just the start

Onyx is an early alpha, released openly and early on purpose. It's stable, safe, and already does things most performance mods don't — but it's the first public version of a project meant to grow for a long time. Future development is focused on:

Continued renderer optimization
Higher terrain throughput
Additional GPU-side improvements
Expanded profiling and benchmarking tools
Broader mod compatibility
Ongoing support for new Minecraft releases

Every future optimization will follow the same philosophy it started with: measure first, optimize second, preserve vanilla always.

And honestly — a project like this grows only if people use it. If Onyx makes your game faster, telling a friend, leaving a comment, or reporting what you find genuinely shapes how far it goes. Everyone here early helps decide what Onyx becomes.

Acknowledgements

Onyx exists because of years of innovation in the Minecraft optimization community. Projects like Sodium, Lithium, FerriteCore, Krypton, ModernFix, and many others have shown just how far the game's performance can be pushed through careful engineering. Onyx is an independent implementation, developed from its own codebase — but it's built with genuine respect for the work that came before it.

Made by Loki91. Thank you for trying an alpha, and for being early.

Onyx ( Fabric )