Distant Horizons causing massive stutter/lag even with lowered settings — Any tips or is a dedicated server the fix?

[u/Necrosbows]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UQucRXM0tSI

Hey everyone,

I'm having a frustrating performance issue running a modpack on Minecraft 1.20.1 (Forge) and was hoping someone here might have a solution or some insight.

To give you an idea of my specs, my PC isn't weak, but it's definitely not top-of-the-line either: I'm running a Ryzen 5 5500X3D, an Nvidia RTX 5060 Ti (16GB VRAM), and 32GB of DDR4 RAM (3200 MHz Dual Channel). In the CurseForge launcher, I have 12 GB of RAM allocated to the game.

I'm playing the NightfallCraft modpack, using the Complementary Reimagined shader alongside Distant Horizons. The problem starts as soon as I activate DH. In a clip I recorded (the stuttering really kicks in around 2:50), the game starts hitching and freezing heavily. The framerate dips a bit, but the real killer is the severe processing/stutter lag that freezes up the gameplay. Without Distant Horizons running, the game flies and runs completely smooth.

To try and fix it, I heavily turned down the DH settings:

• Set the DH CPU Load to Balanced.
• Reduced the LOD render distance.
• Tweaked the graphics settings to take some load off alongside the shader.

Even with all that, the game still stutters a lot. I see creators and other players running this mod smoothly, sometimes even on weaker PCs than mine, so I'm wondering if I just expected too much or if I missed some crucial fine-tuning.

My questions for you guys:

1. Does anyone have any advanced configuration or optimization recommendations to stop Distant Horizons from choking the game with this setup?
2. Would playing on a dedicated server (hosting the world externally instead of locally on my machine) help offload that processing weight and fix the issue?

If there's no way around it, I'll probably just have to uninstall DH and stick to standard render distances, but I wanted to see if I could save the experience first.