Two unrelated mods share the Better FPS name, and searches mix them up constantly. The one on this page is Better FPS – Render Distance by someaddon, a small client-side Fabric mod that changes the shape of the area the game draws around you. The older BetterFps by Guichaguri, with its faster sine and cosine algorithms and fog removal, was a Forge mod for the 1.7.10 to 1.12.2 era and has not been updated since 2017. If you came looking for a 1.8.9 or 1.12.2 build, that is the mod you mean, and it is not what we offer here.
A round render distance instead of a square one
Vanilla Minecraft draws every chunk inside a square around the player, all the way up and down. The far corners of that square sit beyond your actual view distance, and the sections deep below or high above you rarely matter. Better FPS swaps the square for a round, three-dimensional area and skips what falls outside it. The author puts the saving at roughly 10 to 35 percent fewer chunk sections drawn, which turns into a modest frame rate gain. The trade-off is easy to spot once you know it: looking diagonally across flat land, terrain ends a little sooner than in vanilla, because those corners are exactly what gets cut. Textures and lighting are untouched.
The shape can be stretched. Horizontal and vertical scaling are adjustable in the config or through a button the mod adds to Video Settings; that button does not appear when OptiFine is installed. You can also choose whether the shorter distance applies to entities, and turn on a debug mode that shows the effect. For players using Distant Horizons, the author suggests vertical stretch at 100% and horizontal at 0%. On a server the mod does nothing, so there is no point installing it there.
Where it fits among optimization mods
Better FPS is a small tweak, not a replacement for the big performance mods, because each of them works on a different part of the game:
- Sodium rewrites the chunk renderer itself and usually brings the largest gain on Fabric. Start there.
- Lithium optimizes game logic for single-player worlds and servers, which helps when the simulation, not the graphics card, is the bottleneck.
- Dynamic FPS cuts the frame rate when the window is in the background or idle, saving power rather than raising FPS.
- Better FPS reduces the number of chunk sections at the edges of your view.
The only conflict the author lists is the Very Many Players (VMP) mod. Sodium is not mentioned either way, so if you combine the two, compare F3 numbers with and without Better FPS before keeping it. On a very weak PC a low-resolution pack such as 60K FPS or Blue FPS can help as much as another mod, and our FPS guide covers the settings worth changing first.
Installing the Fabric build
You need Fabric Loader for your game version. Our builds run from 1.18.2 to the 1.21 line, where version 6.0 is meant for 1.21 to 1.21.4. Put the jar in the mods folder of your Fabric installation and launch. The author notes that newer versions require his Cupboard library, so if the crash screen names cupboard as missing, add the Cupboard build for the same game version. Going forward the author publishes new versions mainly through a combined project that ships Fabric and NeoForge files together.
To confirm it works, open Video Settings and look for the new render distance button, or switch on the debug mode and watch the outer chunks drop away.
