The Downfall Of Minecraft’s Performance

In 14 years of Minecraft’s existence the game lost one crucial element this game has gotten increasingly more into that made the game unplayable this needs to be fixed it’s performance this became so bad that today’s some of the biggest events some of the most advanced technical servers as well as 2b2t plain

Version 1.12 a version that came out five years ago what went wrong in the newer versions of the game but to truly explain what happened to this game we’ll need to understand the basics of lag this is FPS lag it can occur when your graphics card can’t process frames fast

Enough either because you have a bunch of things in the scene to render or because your CPU is calculating something else and simply can’t give the graphics card the data in time there is also this kind of lag this can be called TPS lag everything that Minecraft does

Is organized into two exist and takes three game ticks to extend most hostile mobs spawn every few game ticks fire crops ice essentially the entire game is controlled by EPS CPU will try its best to calculate a new tick 20 times every second but once calculating annuity takes longer than 50 milliseconds the

Game starts lagging and now that we know the basics we can finally start measuring the performance let’s start with a process all players have to go through generating a new world starting in a version almost 10 years old generating a new world would take around 6 seconds each new update took a bit

Longer won the 13 alone increased the generation Time by 70 in a single update the situation improved in the next few updates but then this happened yes something as simple as generating a new world now takes eight times as long as it did just a couple of versions ago but

Sure if you are not a speedrunner and generating new worlds daily this probably doesn’t bother you what about normal gameplay well I have loaded the exact same world into 13 different versions and tested their performances here is an average FPS graph of when the player is standing still throughout

Different versions and even though the player is doing absolutely nothing the performance has still declined over 40 percent from its peak in the 1.13 update in the update 1.14 Mojang added a nice graph for detecting lag spikes in the game the left graph shows you frame times which indicate FPS lag and the

Right graphs shows you times needed to calculate each tick indicating TPS lag ideally you would want all of those bars to be as low as possible and by all means below this line interestingly we can see when we are doing absolutely nothing we are increasingly seeing more

Lag spikes as we progress towards newer versions one of the most well-known problems in Minecraft has to be generating new chunks and oh boy do the new versions suffer I imported the same world into 13 different versions of the game and observed the lag generated from generating new chunks starting with the

Average FPS during my tests we can see that the average FPS drops significantly from 170 in 1.7 to only 15 1.19 by plotting the lowest FPS encounter during the experiment we can see that 1.7 didn’t experience any FPS drop at all but with each new version of the game

The FPS drops became more and more severe this can be clearly seen in size and the duration of lag spikes which grew so huge that they didn’t even fit on the screen anymore with such huge lag spikes the game simply can’t keep up at all by plotting the maximal time is

Needed to calculate a single tick we can see how far extended we are from the safe area of 50 milliseconds if the game can’t keep up when we are simply walking and generating a few new chunks how can we expect the game to be capable of running some of the most advanced farms

And the Contraptions on the planet let’s see how Mojang is dealing with this update 1-13 codenamed update aquatic was one of many updates intended to improve and to refresh modern day mechanics of Minecraft but with the amount of changes to the game this update became notorious for its enormous lag spikes and bad

Multiplayer performance the consequences of that update can be still seen today 2b2t and quite a few technical servers are still using a version that came out more than 5 years ago Mojang took notice and during the development of their next version try to improve the situation and in fact they achieved some very

Encouraging results the world generation became 14 faster the lag spikes were a bit less severe than in the previous versions and the lowest FPS that I have recorded during my test was also two times better in the same update Mojang moved the light calculations to another thread which significantly reduced the

Horrible x-pikes we were getting before when placing in giant roofs that Trend said they didn’t last long in November of 2020 Mojang released the case and cliffs update prior to this update the world height was 256 blocks but after the update they increased it by 50 percent meaning that the entire game had

Much more blocks to process each tick which of course had consequences to all fairness we are still missing one crucial side of the story all of my benchmarks were measured on this PC which by no means is the newest so we have to ask ourselves did our machines simply become obsolete with time

In 1965 engineer by the name Gordon Moore realized that the number of transistors on an integrated circuit roughly doubles each two years and even today 58 years from when that original observation was made the technology is still more or less advancing at the predicted Pace but does this mean that

Our computers are simply outdated it’s all thanks when Minecraft was made in 2009 the CPUs of that time usually came with just a couple of cores there was no real need to make the game run across multiple cores as that is more complicated and so the game took only advantage of one

Single core over the years Engineers found it harder to make the cores themselves faster so they started installing more of them side by side onto the same chip even though the total performance of a new CPU is much faster thanks to its multi-core performance the single cores are only two times faster

Which means that the CPUs simply can’t keep up with Minecraft’s ever increasing demands since Mojang will probably never rewrite the entire game’s code from scratch to implement multi-threading does that mean that we are doomed to keep losing performance forever if vanilla Minecraft can’t give us playable performance maybe modding

Community can save us I have downloaded the following mods and repeated the already done tests in the latest version of the game the average FPS from the walk experiment increased from 55 to over 140 average FPS the lowest FPS during the experiment Rose from 5 to over 13 FPS mspt decreased from 125

Milliseconds to only 48 which means that the game didn’t skip any ticks at all with only 3 mods that do not change the game’s behavior in any way it is possible to dramatically improve Minecraft’s performance this proves that it is not necessary to completely rewrite the entire game from scratch to

Achieve great performance but just imagine how much more smoothly the game could be running if it would be properly multi-threaded Mojang please grant our wishes and focus one of your next updates on performance but while we wait for this update to happen I would like to show you guys an even bigger problem

Which has severely affected Minecraft’s community click this video to learn more