Tutorial:Improving frame rate

Frame rate (also known as fps) is the frequency rate at which a video device produces unique consecutive images called frames. Frames are still pictures that when in a sequence form a fluid animation that is the basis for all moving media. Frame rate is most often expressed in frames per second (FPS).

Low FPS will result in a "choppy" gaming experience, as far as looking like a slideshow in extreme cases. Difficult calculations (like blowing up large amounts of TNT or spawning in a large number of mobs) can temporarily decrease the FPS to a complete stop.

Monitoring frame rate

Press F3 to bring up the debug screen. The frame rate will be shown under the Minecraft version at the top left.

Note that the debug screen is known to cause more load to your system, resulting in lower FPS than you would normally achieve, so your FPS might increase as soon as you close the display. You can still see the FPS in other ways, such as downloading GUI mods.

Game Settings

Most of the following suggestions are configurable in the game's Options menu, accessible by pressing Esc.

• Turn down your render and simulation distances.
• Set Maximum FPS to Unlimited; however, lower-mid end PCs will experience stutter. Setting the maximum FPS to 30 is another option, as this looks good enough but is easier on the computer overall.
• Reduce Graphics from Fabulous! to Fancy or Fast.
• Turn off smooth lighting and clouds.
• Reduce your FOV.
• Reduce Particles to Decreased or Minimal.
• Turn off V-Sync.
• If the mouse cursor is lagging, change the mouse sensitivity to HYPERSPEED!!!.
• Reduce or disable mipmaps. Note that this can result in water/lava drips not being visible, and thus taking a lava bath.
• Reduce or disable biome blending. This will make the color of certain blocks change less smoothly between biomes.
• Reduce the size of the game's window, as this makes the game render less, making the game run a little bit faster.
  • If your computer has a better graphics card, you might want to enable full screen, as this will make your GPU focus more on Minecraft and less on other programs. Test both ideas and see which setting works best!

Performance-boosting mods

A great many mods exist for the express purpose of boosting performance of all aspects of the game. These mods use a variety of methods, from rewriting and improving the rendering engine to reducing load on the CPU, RAM and more. They can be available standalone (mainly OptiFine), although most are for the Fabric or (Neo)Forge modloaders. Modpacks exist which include all of these mods and more to speed up the base game (see their section in this article).

• OptiFine is the most well-known optimization mod, but only supports either running by itself or as a Forge mod, and in recent years has seen its performance outclassed by mods such as Sodium, and a variety of modpacks to replace all of its features (see the Modded clients and modpacks section). If playing on earlier versions, however, it remains an excellent option.
• Mods for Fabric/Quilt include:
  • Sodium significantly rewrites the rendering engine, providing the biggest performance boost out of perhaps all Fabric mods. Sodium Extra can also be used to add many of OptiFine's options.
  • Lithium brings several performance increases to the game's internal server.
  • Entity Culling significantly improves performance with a large number of entities.
  • ImmediatelyFast improves the performance of rendering entities, GUIs and more.
  • More Culling improves culling of invisible block faces in many parts of the game and adds optional leaves culling akin to Cull Leaves to improve FPS.
  • DynamicFPS lowers the game's FPS when the game's window is not in focus.
  • FerriteCore optimizes RAM usage. This is unlikely to improve FPS in most cases, but could allow other running programs to use more RAM.
  • ModernFix reduces the game's RAM usage as well as load times with many optimizations.
  • Enhanced Block Entities makes some block entities use block models rather than laggy entity models.
  • Nvidium significantly increases FPS at high Render Distance on modern Nvidia GPUs with mesh shaders support.
  • VulkanMod rewrites the rendering engine to support the Vulkan-api, which greatly improves overall FPS. In general has higher performance and better support for older GPUs than Sodium, but has serious compatibility issues with most mods. Technically incompatible with Sodium.
  • If playing on versions prior to 1.20, these mods will be useful as well:
    • Starlight and Phosphor are helpful to speed up lightning calculations.
    • LazyDFU speeds up the game's startup
    • If playing past 1.20, they are not needed, as their improvements were made official in that update.
• Mods for Forge/NeoForge include:
  • Multiple Forge ports of Sodium available. They are NOT and will never be compatible with OptiFine or each other.
    • Rubidium seems to be more up-to-date than Magnesium.
    • Magnesium though is a bit more popular.
    • Embeddium, a fork of Rubidium with better compatibility.
    • Sodium starting from Minecraft version 1.21 is also available for NeoForge.
  • Starlight Forge is the official Forge version of Starlight, to optimize the lighting engine.
    • Starlight is no longer needed past 1.20, as its improvements were made official.
  • Multiple Forge ports of Lithium available.
    • RoadRunner is an unofficial port of Lithium for Forge, to optimize general game systems.
    • Canary is another fork of Lithium. Available for more versions than RoadRunner.
    • Radium is an unofficial fork of Lithium with more frequent updates. Seems to have better performance than Canary.
    • Lithium starting from Minecraft version 1.21 is also available for NeoForge.
  • FerriteCore Forge is the official Forge version of FerriteCore, to reduce RAM usage.
  • Oculus is a port of Iris to Forge, recommended to be used with Rubidium.

In addition to these optimization mods, avoid performance-heavy mods which add resource-intensive content.

Gameplay Issues

• Consider not going to the Nether often on lower-end PCs, due to their complex terrain and expansive contents. Particularly complex terrain like mountains, jungles, mangrove swamps, or even ancient cities, can also be troublesome.
• If in multiplayer, move away from areas densely populated by players.
• Large numbers of item frames in view (even through walls) can cause lag. This includes map walls!
• Be careful about building large farms or other devices. While these are very useful in-game, they can create much lag. Including a lever to disable it might be a good idea.
  • While crop growth is not usually burdensome, for sufficiently large farms even plant growth can add up.
  • Farms that produce large amounts of animals or item entities can cause lag.
  • Large and complex redstone devices, especially those driven by fast clocks, can likewise make trouble. Keeping redstone dust and other changeable blocks out of sight can be helpful.
    • Rapid changes in lighting are especially troublesome. Several redstone devices emit changeable light: Even switching a redstone torch can require updating the light levels for blocks up to 6 spaces away. Redstone lamps (and mobile glowstone or other lights), can affect much larger areas, especially if they are illuminating a complex landscape or build.

Outside of Minecraft

• Close or minimize any programs in the background, especially Internet browsers such as Chrome, Firefox, Safari etc.
• On Windows, open Task Manager and go to the details section, find javaw.exe (the one the game uses), right click it and set its priority to "High" (not "Realtime", as realtime will try to allocate all of the PC's resources (RAM/CPU/GPU) to the game, not leaving enough for Windows to function, causing it to freeze or even blue-screen).
• Make sure you have enough RAM available (in a program such as a task manager), else your computer may swap to disk, which could cause the game to stutter intermittently.
• On laptops and many pre-built desktops, uninstall bloatware.
• The current Minecraft Launcher is very slow and resource-intensive to boot both itself and the game. Instead of using it, check out some third-party launchers, who do the same job with much, much less resources. (See their section in this article.) Note that they are not associated with Mojang, and take caution to only download known alternative launchers, from their official sources.
• Do frequent malware scans with an antivirus program, to ensure no malicious programs are consuming computer resources.
• Do not run other CPU- or GPU-intensive programs while the game is open.
• On Windows Vista through Windows 7, disable graphical effects such as Windows Aero and taskbar transparency.
• Disable compositing (sometimes called "desktop effects") on GNU/Linux. When compositing is disabled, all window managers tend to give similar performance, so there is no need to use a "lightweight" one.
• Update your graphics card drivers. You can find these on your GPU manufacturer's website.
• Disable anti-aliasing and anisotropic filtering in your GPU driver settings.
• Ensure the computer is running at a cool enough temperature so as to not cause thermal throttling. This is especially effective for laptops and older desktops. If the computer is too hot, look into cleaning out dust.
• Reduce the display resolution.
• You may be able to switch your operating system to a GNU/Linux distribution, depending on what you use your computer for. Linux is generally easier on the computer's resources compared to Windows. However, it is important to research hardware/software compatibility (for example, Nvidia graphics cards) before switching operating systems. This makes the most effect on AMD graphics cards, which can see a 2x performance improvement from Linux drivers on OpenGL games such as Minecraft! There are many distributions to choose from, but you should stick to tried and trusted ones. Some recommended distros for beginners include Linux Mint (Cinnamon desktop with a Windows-like interface, large community, wide application support, easy to install graphics drivers), Fedora (cutting-edge technologies, GNOME desktop (not the most familiar), also wide community) or Pop!_OS (GNOME desktop, also very good graphics support).
  • Note that a lot of Windows software isn't available for Linux, including Adobe software, Microsoft Office, as well as many games (Minecraft is an exception, most Steam games also work). You may find alternatives though, such as LibreOffice.
  • If you'd like to have both operating systems, you should look into dual-booting.
• If you are playing on a desktop computer, look into upgrading your graphics card, which can help the game render objects faster.

JVM optimizations

• Use a high performance garbage collector such as ZGC (for servers) or Shenandoah (for clients). These consume more CPU resources than the default one, but reduce lag spikes. See the Minecraft Performance Flags benchmark for more information.
• Allocate a reasonable amount of memory to Minecraft. Minecraft runs best with 2-4 GB of memory. Using ZGC or Shenandoah allows for large 16+ GB allocation without a performance penalty unlike the default G1GC collector. Be sure to leave memory for the system and other programs!
• Use the latest OpenJDK to play Minecraft. If you're on Windows, install OpenJDK from Adoptium.

Stuttering on Mac

• Try testing your performance while toggling the V-Sync option.
• The other option when V-Sync is off to stop the stuttering is to set the maximum FPS down to 30, matching the FPS seen when having V-Sync off, rather than FPS being set to Unlimited as suggested above.

Alternative Minecraft launchers

The official Minecraft Launcher (sometimes known as Mojang Launcher) is incredibly slow and inefficient, so here are some trusted alternatives players can use:

• Prism Launcher - a popular fork of MultiMC that inherits its ability to have multiple, cleanly separated instances of Minecraft (each with their own mods, resource packs, saves, etc) and helps you manage them and their associated options with an intuitive and incredibly lightweight interface. Prism also introduces a built in resource pack and mod downloader, automatic Java installation, a skin manager, and improved Linux support, among other improvements.
• ATLauncher - Allows you to easily download mods without having to download them from CurseForge and transferring those mods to your Minecraft folder.
• GDLauncher

Modded clients and modpacks

There are also clients that improve performance and are mainly intended for PVP. Examples include:

• Lunar Client - Arguably the most popular and reliable client in Minecraft, Lunar can boost your performance and doesn't have a laggy GUI, though in modern versions it doesn't boost as much FPS as its main rival, Feather.
• Badlion
• Labymod

However, many PVP clients have been criticized for poor privacy practices, stealing mods, and selling capes (which is against the community guidelines). Using a selection of performance-optimizing mods such as Sodium and Lithium usually gives better frame rates than PVP clients.

There are many modpacks available that include a selection of performance mods, such as:

• Fabulously Optimized - includes performance mods as well as other quality of life mods and mods that provide parity with OptiFine (including Iris for shader support).
• Simply Optimized - contains only performance mods with no quality of life or visual enhancement mods, meaning frame rates will usually be slightly higher.
• Adrenaline - performance modpack with no quality-of life mods.
• Additive - modpack based on Adrenaline, which additionally includes quality of life mods aiming for OptiFine parity.

External links

• PirateCraft, 25 tricks on how to fix Minecraft lag