Hi all. First time poster, long time lurker. First off, IC2 is a great mod, and I really like all the addons that have been developed for it. I've been playing Minecraft for a long time and IC2 is still one of my "main" mods. I give my thanks to Player and others who have contributed content. Now, some words about FastCraft:
I find that I have to use both FastCraft (FC) 1.21 and Optifine together to get decent framerates for modded Minecraft. While FC deals mostly with chunk loading optimization, I found that it really doesn't help with textures. I use custom texture packs in my game, and in my testing I've found that FC doesn't give quite the FPS boost if used by itself. Optifine, on the other hand, does give the performance enhancement with custom textures, but chunk loading suffers resulting in a significant drop in frame rate. This is especially true when using mods that feature different dimensions. In one of my test worlds, traveling to a different dimension using just Optifine made the game unplayable due to the huge FPS drop. The dimension just wouldn't load. So I exited the game, installed FastCraft, loaded up my world, and saw an immediate increase in performance. The dimension loaded correctly and I was able to continue as normal.
Anyway, I just wanted to add my input, and thanks to Player for creating this much needed addon.