Mercurizer

Mercurizer sits on top of Sodium and is aimed at hardware that struggles with Minecraft, including integrated graphics like Intel HD/UHD or AMD Vega, older processors, and machines with roughly 4 GB of RAM. Many general optimizations assume a dedicated GPU and plenty of memory, so the addon focuses on GPU upload bandwidth, driver round-trip latency and CPU throughput. Sodium must be installed alongside it, and the mod runs on the client only, so servers and other players do not need it.

On the first three launches Mercurizer runs a benchmark that measures the system, then averages the results across the three runs to set chunk upload budgets, texture and animation thresholds. The benchmark is repeated after a GPU driver change. Once roughly half a minute of steady play has passed, the mod watches the frame times the game actually produces and adjusts its settings to match. When frame times spike, it quickly reduces the amount of work uploaded, then restores the workload gradually as performance stabilizes, which limits the constant increase and decrease cycle that causes micro-stutters.

Certain AMD driver setups and older Intel chips are given cautious values from the start, without any manual tuning. The developers state that aggressive tuning would compromise stability, so the addon prioritizes keeping the game running.