[PSA/Guide] Why you shouldn't use OptiFine [1.16+]

So, I decided to test those non-optifine mods for a week. I have to say, for the present, I'll be sticking with optifine.
Reasons:
1. sodium sucks. It's options are really limited and even messing with them, I was still getting weird visual glitches, like water disappearing when you look at it through glass a certain way. It also removes the normal mc visual settings menu to have whatever gross thing it wants to call a menu is, which also means you don't get to have all of vanilla's settings anymore. It's kind of like having apple, they choose what you get and give you some options to make it feel like you have choices, even though you really don't because none of the options actually do anything.

2. having to install like 10 mods to get all the visual settings optifine provides, like being able to control each type of particle effect individually, or the distance and density of fog (and the mod that does this doesn't tell you what the options it has, do).

3. Iris looks promising, but it's still pretty lacking right now and has a lot of bugs. I didn't try any other shader mods tho, so maybe they're better.

4. the connected texture mod really sucks. as far as visually, the glass texture is messed up and it appears to have been so since forever, as well as having to rely on someone's resource pack, which may connect textures you don't want connected, or whatever other weird quirks they include.

5. optifine is just easier than hunting down all those other mods, every update. Sure, it's not compatible with various fabric mods, but, I never/don't need to use those anyway. It's compatible with phosphor and that's about the only other non resource pack visual mod I use normally.

So yeah, blah blah blah, optifine bad. But it's just so much easier, convenient and works better than most of the "replacement" mods in my opinion. So you do you waffle, but I'm gonna stick with optifine unless there really is a better option that shows up.

I'm glad to see/hear that others have tried it as well.

I'll admit that it's not something I'd use fulltime either. As time has marched on, I've missed using some Forge mods that (most likely) will never be ported over to Fabric. Since that is the case, I use both, depending on my use case when playing Minecraft.

Updated to 1.18.

Sorry for not replying sooner, I meant to but then entirely forgot! Whoops.

Here's a single mod that add most of the things you mentioned: Sodium Extras
You can also access the vanilla video settings menu with Shift+P.

Yeah, that's been annoying me too. It's a known issue, though, and has proven to be very difficult to fix for any developer who tries to.

Things have changed in five months, I'm sure of it When I wrote this, Iris had just done its first public release ever, and they've done five stable releases since then. They've also got configurations in public beta testing on their Discord server, and if I had to take a wild guess, it'll be released before EMC updates to 1.18.

It sucks royally. PepperCode1 also thought it was pretty bad, so they made their own alternative! Continuity. I even wrote a blog post for Modrinth's blog about it when it came out

If it makes it any easier, there's also a modpack called Fabulously Optimized that has all of these mods. It has versions for every version since 1.16.

So... how come you now recommend using Quilt over Fabric?

A few reasons. For one, a few of the mods I use have switched to only supporting Quilt; for two, I am not a fan of the Fabric leadership, especially as someone who is LGBTQ+; and for three, I'm a moderator for Quilt (amongst several other volunteer positions) so it's always cool to see people using the work you've helped create.

Cool but... is Quilt actually faster than Fabric or anything like that?

Pretty much on-par. Not worse, not better.

Ever since Iris has adopted shader settings that are near identical to Optifine, I am more of a user of Fabric now. I enjoy the modularity and I get exponentially more performance with Fabric than I ever did with Optifine. Kudos to the Iris dev team! It truly feels like I have a high-end GPU at this point!

However, my previous post still holds true. Until there is a way to bridge Forge mods into Fabric, I use both when I play Minecraft. This is because I doubt the Forge mods that I use will ever be recoded to work with Fabric, natively. (Even if there was a way to bridge Forge mods into Fabric, I question the performance and stability of that, compared to using Forge itself.)

Nice to see that Fabric is maturing though.

Today I made my switch from Fabric to Quilt. I've known tiny bits from word-of-mouth of how it came to be, but today I found out the full story of what happened. That was more than enough for me to switch over entirely.

I want to give a shoutout to wafflecoffee for speaking to me in private DMs on Discord about Quilt and helping me set it up~ Thank you so much!! ^^



Take this disgusting image. This was the first thing I saw when I loaded a singleplayer world to confirm that Quilt was working!