Minecraft: Java Edition Performance Analysis

Minecraft arguably one of the most popular games of all time has been making a resurgence in a lot of gaming circles over the past year or two and even though i already made a video about minecraft and how it performs i feel as if that video didn’t go deep

Enough into the actual performance and instead stuck more to the reasoning for the differences so to rectify this and to properly tackle the subject let’s take another look at minecraft java edition and check out how it performs on a variety of hardware Alright so before i dig into the hard numbers let me go over some differences between the games and actually revise some of the information i discussed in my previous video i first wanted to address what was commented by ronnie cz which reads the performance difference between java and c

Plus is something around 10 which is almost nothing continuing on later with the real problem with minecraft java edition is the quality of the code which is a statement that i completely ignored in my previous video now if you’re confused by the term quality of code what he’s actually referring to is the

Efficiency of the algorithms being used he actually mentions this in part of his comment and brings up the fact that bedrock was rewritten from the ground up by a much more experienced team rather than a couple guys programming in their basement it’s not to knock java edition but it’s

Just the facts and proof of this can be shown on your own system if we load into a world and fly up you can see that chunks are loading in radially around the camera irrespective of whether or not the chunk is actually in view this can be confirmed by quickly turning

The camera and you’ll see the chunks behind you are already loaded in bedrock edition if we do the same thing renders chunks with respect to your camera’s view and is shown through turning the camera and you can see stuff loading in optifine is a popular mod that helps

Performance and it does so by optimizing chunk generation similar to what bedrock uses for example if you’re facing east and your fov is set to only 90 degrees that means for 270 degrees java edition is rendering parts of the world that you aren’t even looking at some of the world’s most advanced and

Optimized rendering engines such as what’s found in doom eternal actually occlude individual vertices in a piece of geometry depending on visibility to the camera an optifine and sodium use a similar technique to squeeze more performance out of your hardware as well as introducing more graphical switches that you can enable or disable

Imagine you wrote a game when you were a novice programmer it wasn’t much but you’re proud of it because it’s a big step forward for you now go back and look at it after eight years of experience and you’d be able to find tons of little bugs and efficiency hacks

That you could iron out the second piece of information i want to clear up is the fact that java is a compiled language it first takes your code and compiles it down into bytecode which is read by the java virtual machine c plus and c are also compiled languages

However the final compiled formats are what differs between a c language and java another commenter actually brought this up however i’m struggling to find the actual comment they left however when something along the lines of java is optimized for different use cases and games just aren’t one of the intended uses

This is a hundred and ten percent true and i know this for a fact because i personally have experience using java based machines in grocery stores in fact i’m sure most of us have because tons of corporate terminals run using code written in java it’s more of a language designed to keep

Track of a massive amount of data whereas c plus plus is more optimized for speed of execution and resource control it overall accounts for less of a gap than i made it seem however the difference in the underlying tech is still there let’s move into performance though and

Take a look at how java edition performs on a variety of core configurations and try to gauge what you would need to run minecraft java edition smoothly all right so the first thing i did to try engage performance was spawn into a super flat world and just record the average frame rate

Over the course of 10 minutes i also logged the recorded frame rates and put them into a graph to show you how fps fluctuated over time you can see from this particular run the game ran excellently and even though there were some frame drops and rhythmic patterns

For the most part it was stable around the 760 fps mark keep in mind that i’m running minecraft on an i9 9900k so this processor should be able to handle the game exceptionally well and with the render distance set to 32 chunks this processor delivers stable performance and high frame rates

However when we move into a randomly generated world things start to look well rough keeping our render distance set to 32 chunks i hopped into a new world in creative and just flew around with an elytra performance was honestly kind of rough at times with our frame rate constantly fluctuating

And only becoming relatively consistent at around the 470 second mark only for the erratic behavior to return less than 30 seconds later to get an idea as to what kind of setup you would need to run minecraft java edition i also tested on a 6 core 12 thread configuration

Which had frame rates that were significantly more erratic even though the frame rate actually looks higher at points it overall felt slightly worse to play however was consistent for the most part this is just an uncapped frame rate so you will feel stutters at times but it remained playable utilizing 12 skylake threads

Moving into 4 cores and 8 threads minecraft performance was overall depressed and the erratic spikes and frame rate are for the most part gone i also noted that the overall distribution of work seemed to be much more consistent between the cores whereas before there would be one or two cores essentially sitting idle

While the other thread sat at around 90 to 100 utilization this is probably a symptom of the overall lack of multi-threaded processing in java edition and just shows that four cores is enough to power through minecraft for giggles and grins i also ran two cores and four threads and performance while technically

Playable was sub-optimal to the point where it was sort of nauseating due to the hitching turning on vsync would fix a lot of the issues as locking your frame rate helps to keep render times consistent however with the dips we were seeing into the low 30s it was playable but not playable

Overall from the testing conducted the conclusion seems to be that four cores is enough to play minecraft java edition at 60fps and above with hyper threading offering smoother performance with an overall higher average 6 cores and 12 threads and above felt the most consistent which is what you’d find with a modern

I5 with two cores and four threads allowing for playable but sub-optimal performance i would recommend at least an i3 8100 or optimally an i3 10-100f if you’re looking to start a budget centric build but if you’re looking for ultra smooth performance then the i5 10400f would offer you an incredible experience

Especially for the price minecraft java edition while i made it to be worse than bedrock actually has an overall similar but depressed performance profile centralized around the lack of more efficient algorithms and the overall worst garbage collection of java in reality it’s less of an apples-to-apples comparison and it’s more apples to oranges

They’re both impressive games however and i’m surprised how much the game has evolved especially in just the time since i released my original performance analysis video it’s as fun a game as i remember and i can’t wait to see what they bring next to the game that i spent a majority of

My childhood building on You