Minecraft Performance Tips and Tricks

Today, we're going to go over how to hopefully get a bit more FPS out of Minecraft, for those of us on hardware that might be ill suited or behind what is needed to reach 60 FPS.

1)JVM Arguments
These can be extremely important, and affect even good computers. By default, Minecraft will allocate 1GB of RAM for itself. By putting in proper arguments, however, you can allocate more (or less, but it probably would crash itself at less then 1GB).

First, open the launcher and select Launch options. From there, ensure Advanced Settings is turned on. Now, click on the profile below that you use for the game, and you'll see a bunch of options. The only one that matters to us is JVM Arguments. Turn that on, and input the following in the text field:

-Xmx4G -XX:+UseConcMarkSweepGC -XX:+CMSIncrementalMode -XX:-UseAdaptiveSizePolicy -Xmn128M

In the case of -Xmx4G, you may replace the 4 with any number you wish. I recommend going no higher then half the RAM available to your computer, to keep some available for your operating system and other programs. This should give a performance boost.

2)Optifine
This mod gives many, many new options to use to optimize your experience. Rather then go over it again, however, there's already a guide on the forums on how to install Forge and Optifine. For those with weaker hardware, I recommend ignoring the instructions for shaders, though most texture packs will not negatively impact your performance unless picking an exceptionally large (256x or bigger) one.

https://www.seriousgmod.com/threads/how-to-make-minecraft-look-pretty-extra-mods.37157/

Once you have Optifine installed, there are two key options you can enable that can in some cases dramatically improve FPS. Start the game, and in Options, select Video Settings, then Performance. If Performance is absent, then Optifine and/or Forge are not installed correctly. The best way to ensure it is, is to look at the title screen. If in the bottom right it says 'Powered by Forge' as well as 'Optifine', it is installed correctly.

Once in that menu, turn on both Fast Render and Fast Math. These two alone can help get more FPS, but if your FPS is still under 60, there are a few more things that can be done. In Video Settings, in the Quality option, you can change the Mipmap Type to Nearest.

3)Misc
Finally, you can change a few more settings. These are default to Minecraft, and thus if you've elected to skip the Optifine steps, can try these.

In Video Settings, Render Distance can play a huge role in FPS. By lowering this, the game will render less chunks, which on older hardware can help immensely. Smooth Lighting also can be turned off.