Why Your Minecraft FPS Is Low (And How to Fix It Fast)

You've got a powerful gaming PC, but Minecraft is still chugging along at 150 FPS or worse. Something feels wrong. The truth is, vanilla Minecraft's performance is surprisingly terrible, even on high-end hardware. The good news? You can boost Minecraft FPS by 3 to 4 times with the right optimization mods – specifically with the modpack we've created for you!

Why vanilla Minecraft's performance is so bad?

Minecraft's rendering engine hasn't aged well. Despite being one of the most popular games ever made, the vanilla version suffers from inefficient rendering, poor resource management, and a shocking lack of optimization. The game doesn't intelligently decide what to render. It happily wastes GPU power drawing blocks you can't even see, entities hidden behind walls, and chunks outside your field of view.

The physics engine and mob AI aren't much better. They run on outdated code that doesn't take advantage of modern multi-core processors. Your expensive CPU sits there using maybe two cores while the other six twiddle their thumbs. Lighting calculations are particularly brutal, causing lag spikes whenever chunks load or light sources change.

Here's the kicker: a high-end system with a modern GPU and plenty of RAM might only hit 150 FPS in vanilla Minecraft. That's pathetic for a game made of blocks. This isn't a "your PC is bad" problem. It's a fundamental issue with how Minecraft handles rendering and resource management. Optimization mods aren't optional anymore. They're essential for modern gameplay.

⏰ 60-Second Summary of the Modpack

🚀 Maximum Performance: Carefully selected and configured mods to significantly boost your FPS, reduce stutter, and optimize memory usage on any device. In our tests, the FPS gain was about 3-4x with this modpack.

🪶 Extremely Lightweight: By including only optimization mods, the pack is incredibly light, loads instantly, and is easy to maintain.

🌍 Works Everywhere: As a purely client-side pack with no content altering mods, it is compatible with any vanilla world or server.

🧱 The Perfect Base: This is the ideal foundation for building your own custom modpack. Add your favorite QoL, visual, or content mods on top without worrying about conflicting performance mods.

⚡ Rapid Updates: Our simple, focused approach means we can update to new Minecraft versions incredibly quickly.

We have created a complete optimization modpack called Essentially Optimized that gets rid of all the lag for you. Unlike other optimization modpacks, we haven't added anything extra to it – it's made purely to enhance your game's FPS.

🧩 But what's in the modpack?

Sodium (Sodium Extra, Reese's Sodium Options)
Sodium is the gold standard when it comes to optimizing your game on Fabric. It’s is a rendering optimization mod for Minecraft that boosts frame rates and compatibility without changing the look and feel of the game. Sodium Extra gives Sodium a lot more options, making it feel more like Optifine. And Reese’s Sodium Options replaces Sodium's options screen with the intention to make the user experience better.

Lithium
Lithium improves the FPS by rewriting the game physics and mob AI, but it doesn't change any vanilla Minecraft mechanics. The mod works on both the client and server, and can be installed on servers without requiring clients to also have the mod. So if you are a server owner and running your server on Fabric, this is a must have mod for you as well.

Ferritecore
This mod reduces the memory usage of Minecraft in a few different ways. If you are low on RAM or have issues of running out of memory, this mod will definitely help you.

Entity Culling & More Culling
Minecraft rendering is fast, but not always smart. What Entity Culling does is it introduces asynchronous path-tracing to efficiently determine what's actually visible to the player, and only render that. Anything that is hidden by blocks or behind you won’t be rendered. This greatly improves the performance by not wasting resources on elements that you can’t even see. More Culling does the same thing, but as far as I understand, even more aggressively, so having these 2 mods installed will cover the culling issues.

ImmediatelyFast
This mod squeezes out extra performance in rendering-heavy situations, where Minecraft's often struggles. Looking at the performance comparisons of this mod, it’s definitely a significant improvement in terms of FPS and a must have in every optimization modpack.

Iris Shaders
Iris does not improve the performance, but it does something else important. It allows us to use shaders while playing on Fabric. Since shaders are a pretty popular feature players want to have, I decided to add this mod to the modpack as well.

C2ME (Concurrent Chunk Management Engine)
C2ME mod is a performance-enhancing mod for Minecraft that focuses on improving chunk generation, I/O, and loading times by utilizing multiple CPU cores. It’s especially useful on the server side, but also gives a lot of improvements on the client side. As you can see on the charts, it helps a lot with chunk loading speeds in multicore instances.

ScalableLux
ScalableLux is a fork of Starlight, a well known mod for rewriting the Minecraft lighting engine that has been discontinued by now unfortunately. ScalableLux contains all the performance improvements from Starlight with additional bug fixes.

Very Many Players
VMP is a Fabric mod designed to improve general server performance at high player count, without sacrificing vanilla functionality or behavior. It has both improvements on server and client side, so you can use it on both if you wish. For best performance, it’s recommended to be used with Lithium.

ModernFix-mVUS
ModernFix is an all-in-one mod that improves performance, reduces memory usage, and fixes many bugs in modern Minecraft versions. The original version has not been unfortunately updated for a very long time. But luckily a community member has made a modified version of the ModernFix and kept it up to date.

BadOptimizations
This mod introduces some pretty good small changes that don’t only focus on rendering, like most of the optimization mods do. It’s a collection of micro optimizations that add up to something bigger!

Fast IP Ping
All this mod does is make the server pinging a lot faster. So you do not have to wait forever for the bars to load anymore. It also makes connecting to the server a lot fast.

Mod Menu
It lets you view the mods you have installed and, if supported by the mod, enables quick and easy access to the mod's config screens. This is a must have mod if you are running your game with multiple mods.

Fabric API & Cloth Config API
These 2 are dependency mods, but I’ll be not going over those since they are just needed for the main mods to work and don’t provide any performance boost.

That's it! Essentially Optimized is a client-side modpack dedicated to one thing: pure optimization. It is designed to deliver the highest possible framerates and the smoothest gameplay experience by focusing only on performance.

Thanks to modern performance mods, this pack often outperforms other optimization solutions by stripping away everything that is unnecessary.