For integrated GPUs, this can greatly reduce memory bandwidth requirements and provide a modest speedup even when GPU-bound. Chunk faces which are not visible (or facing away from the camera) are culled very early in the rendering process, eliminating a ton of geometry that would have to be processed on the GPU only to be immediately discarded.Nearby block updates now take advantage of multi-threading, greatly reducing lag spikes caused by chunks needing to be updated.Vertex data for rendered chunks is made much more compact, allowing for video memory and bandwidth requirements to be cut by almost 40%.Even if your GPU can't keep up, you'll experience much more stable frame times thanks to the CPU being able to work on other rendering tasks while it waits. This can make a huge difference to frame rates for most computers that are not bottle-necked by the GPU or other components.
If you try to use these mods with Sodium, your game may crash or behave unexpectedly. Note: Sodium is mostly stable at this point, but it does not yet contain support for the Fabric Rendering API, which a small number of mods currently use.
It boasts wide compatibility with the Fabric mod ecosystem when compared to other mods and doesn't compromise on how the game looks, giving you that authentic block game feel. Sodium is a free and open-source rendering engine replacement for the Minecraft client that greatly improves frame rates, reduces micro-stutter, and fixes graphical issues in Minecraft. Mileage may vary depending on how powerful your hardware is.
You can find a world download with this exact scene here for your own comparison against this reference. Additional performance improvements have been made since release. Frame rate comparison between vanilla Minecraft and Sodium 0.1 (initial release) at a render distance of 32 chunks.