I've been searching on every forum I can find and for the life of me cannot find a straight answer on this one. My main rig has an AMD1090t, 16Gb of DDR3, on a 512GB Crucial SSD and an AMD Radeon HD5850 and am getting so so performance. (Running three 22" (1600 by 1050) widescreens on that one GPU) I get very inconsistent frames and noticed that gameRenderer typically consumes 80% of the pie graph when you hit F3.
Would upgrading my GPU to something like the HD7850 help fight the inconsistent FPS I'm getting. I used Optifine in the past with success but want to get the game playing well without mods.
I'm not sure what you mean by a "straight answer." The fact is, with computers, hardware/software configurations are nearly infinite, and thus there is no one right answer all the time
Sure, upgrading the GPU will improve things. Will it be enough? If not, is that a sufficient "straight answer?" Anyone can tell you to throw money at the problem.
And it's not much of a "debate" per your subject line. An advanced GPU takes the calculation responsibility away from the CPU, allowing your system to run cooler and faster, and allow you to do more multitasking. To test this, disable your GPU and see how well the game works running only on the CPU or built-in graphics. Not much of a "debate" there.
But the LEVEL of performance, or satisfaction you get with it, is subjective.
Someone may also argue that the SSD is the problem, since their performance can "wobble" over time, after X number of read/write cycles.
Anyway, I think the reason you aren't getting a straight answer is that the straightest answer is "maybe." Sorry!
BigGrayGolem, My apologies (poor choice of words on my part). What I meant by straight answer was that I there seemed to be a lot of back and forth on the benefits of the CPU and GPU with Minecraft. Half the posts I found said that the GPU has no real impact as Minecraft is very CPU intensive. Then the others said that CPU had a big impact but a GPU upgrade could provide large benefits as well. I know its very much a case by case basis for performance but there seemed to be a lot of conflicting posts on the topic.
Tedster, I'm not running Eyefinity I'm each monitor independently. I prefer to have a what ever I'm focusing on full screen on my center monitor (like Minecraft or Cad) and then have other programs like IRC, VLC, Chrome or what have you full screen on the other two. I've tried running minecraft solely on my center monitor with no other programs running as well as with other programs running (complete shutdowns in between each time of course). I did notice a slight drop in FPS with other programs running but nothing significant.
I get the feeling its my GPU because my FPS drops horrifically under ground and when moving above ground. If I'm idling on the surface I get around 100-120 FPS which is great. But as soon as i start to move around it drops to around 45-60 (again not too bad). But when I'm underground (in a fully lit tunnel with nothing below light level 10) my FPS never can climb above 55 even and when I move around it routinely drops to the 25-40 FPS range.
The thing that confuses me is when I have Catalyst Control Center pulled up with only minecraft running my usage readily stays at 0% and occasionally jumps to 25-27% for a short time before dropping to 0% again. I cant imagine my processor is struggling to keep up but the limited GPU activity is really leaving me puzzled if a new GPU would be worth the investment or if there's a configuration issue that is causing me trouble.
I am running Java 7u7x64 and my FPS doesn't seem to be affected by if the game is in full screen or windowed.
BigGrayGolem, My apologies (poor choice of words on my part). What I meant by straight answer was that I there seemed to be a lot of back and forth on the benefits of the CPU and GPU with Minecraft. Half the posts I found said that the GPU has no real impact as Minecraft is very CPU intensive. Then the others said that CPU had a big impact but a GPU upgrade could provide large benefits as well. I know its very much a case by case basis for performance but there seemed to be a lot of conflicting posts on the topic.
Ahh, yes, I've seen those contradictory threads, too. Has something to do with it being written in Java, as opposed to being written to utilize something like the Unreal engine, which is optimized for a GPU.
However, the normal logic usually applies: a GPU will assist the CPU, and thus help it. So it's better than not having one. The amount of benefit will be dependent on RAM, CPU power, GPU power, and your game settings.
Adding a mod like Optifine will also help ensure the GPU is used, or at least not ignored, further offering some relaxation to your CPU.
What you need to do is force MC to give priority to the GPU... similar to setting CPU affinity. I know you can lower the affinity for MC and tell it to apply less cores, in the hope that it will then use the GPU instead, but that could cause problems, too. I'm not sure how to manually switch affinity from the CPU to the GPU... or if that is even possible. I hope someone smarter than me can chime in with the specifics.
Ahh, yes, I've seen those contradictory threads, too. Has something to do with it being written in Java, as opposed to being written to utilize something like the Unreal engine, which is optimized for a GPU.
However, the normal logic usually applies: a GPU will assist the CPU, and thus help it. So it's better than not having one. The amount of benefit will be dependent on RAM, CPU power, GPU power, and your game settings.
Adding a mod like Optifine will also help ensure the GPU is used, or at least not ignored, further offering some relaxation to your CPU.
What you need to do is force MC to give priority to the GPU... similar to setting CPU affinity. I know you can lower the affinity for MC and tell it to apply less cores, in the hope that it will then use the GPU instead, but that could cause problems, too. I'm not sure how to manually switch affinity from the CPU to the GPU... or if that is even possible. I hope someone smarter than me can chime in with the specifics.
That's what I'm thinking may be the issue, that the GPU currently is being ignored all together. I found a post on how to configure an AMD/ATI Graphics card for Minecraft (kept finding Nvidia ones and this is so far the only one I could find for AMD/ATI). I'm going to try and tweak my GPU settings tonight and see if it helps. At the moment my GPU is set to use the program settings, which I think Minecraft is only utilizing the CPU and the GPU is going along with it. But with these settings in Catalyst Control Center it should force Minecraft to use the GPU instead of defaulting to the CPU only.
Will post later tonight with my results. Fingers crossed!
If you have switchable graphics there may or may not be a control available to tell IT that MC should run with the dedicated GPU.
MC itself does not have control over this. You should also be aware that multiple manufacturers have shipped systems that just do not support Open GL on their switchable graphics systems. In this case there may or may not be a manual control to force the dedicated GPU to be used at all times.
Another thing to check out, since you mentioned low FPS while moving, is that some systems do not support the Advanced Open GL functionality (occlusion culling) in hardware. If you are on a system that emulates this in the driver software, then enabling Advanced Open GL will reduce your performance. Net-Net, if Advanced Open GL is on, try turning it off. If it is off, try turning in on.
The truth is that no one optimizes their openGL driver anymore since no games use it...So everyone gets relatively poor performance. What you need to do is monitor CPU usage with task manager, and GPU load and memory usage using GPU-Z to find out what your bottleneck really is while in low FPS situations.
I did a sanity check with GPU-Z and when running MC my GPU is working. I'm going to have to do some more digging into my setup to see if there is anything else that could be dropping frames since theres no reason it should be with this hardware that I can think of.
Maybe I'll get luckily in the mean time and Mojang will end up contracting with Optifine and bake there optimizations into vanilla MC :).
I meant you should see if the GPU is running at 100% load and if your dedicated v-ram usage is overloaded (probably around 1024mb in the case of the Radeon 5850). Also, you are misunderstanding OpenGL. The game always uses opengl when it runs. If you don't have it, it will give errors. What you are seeing in the options is "Advanced OpenGL" which is a ridiculously undescriptive way of saying it enables an extra feature of OpenGL that puts more load on your CPU to calculate what is in your field of vision and only render that. In your triple monitor case- that's basically everything. So I doubt it would do you much good haha. If I were you, I would play around with optifine (which is very easy to install with the wonderful magiclauncher) Getting the game running well without mods, as you put it, is not a very good reason... I get great fps vanilla with my 6850 but I still load optifine because it give me much smoother FPS and multi-core chunk loading and countless other options for tweaking graphics settings I could never live without.
PS, from what I read a while back, mojang contacted the dev of optifine, but they could not reach an agreement so for now it will stay a separate mod
I meant you should see if the GPU is running at 100% load and if your dedicated v-ram usage is overloaded (probably around 1024mb in the case of the Radeon 5850). Also, you are misunderstanding OpenGL. The game always uses opengl when it runs. If you don't have it, it will give errors. What you are seeing in the options is "Advanced OpenGL" which is a ridiculously undescriptive way of saying it enables an extra feature of OpenGL that puts more load on your CPU to calculate what is in your field of vision and only render that. In your triple monitor case- that's basically everything. So I doubt it would do you much good haha. If I were you, I would play around with optifine (which is very easy to install with the wonderful magiclauncher) Getting the game running well without mods, as you put it, is not a very good reason... I get great fps vanilla with my 6850 but I still load optifine because it give me much smoother FPS and multi-core chunk loading and countless other options for tweaking graphics settings I could never live without.
PS, from what I read a while back, mojang contacted the dev of optifine, but they could not reach an agreement so for now it will stay a separate mod
Looking at GPUz in the overworld my GPU load is seems to bounce between 25-35% and shows 850MB of dedicated memory usage. In the Nether the GPU load is higher staying around 45% but I get around 30FPS more then I do in the overworld. Also my CPU usage seems to average out to be around 30-35% so the CPU is not maxed out either. I don't think its the SSD because frames improved some when I upgraded to it. I do have a mechanical drive in my PC as well so I can move it to there and see if that helps any.
There was something I saw about Oracle and AMD teaming up to modify Java to taking better advantage of the GPU a well as multicore processors so maybe in a year or two minecraft will magically get a little better from a better java runtime implementation haha
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Would upgrading my GPU to something like the HD7850 help fight the inconsistent FPS I'm getting. I used Optifine in the past with success but want to get the game playing well without mods.
Thanks for any help you can spare!
~DrexLock
Sure, upgrading the GPU will improve things. Will it be enough? If not, is that a sufficient "straight answer?" Anyone can tell you to throw money at the problem.
And it's not much of a "debate" per your subject line. An advanced GPU takes the calculation responsibility away from the CPU, allowing your system to run cooler and faster, and allow you to do more multitasking. To test this, disable your GPU and see how well the game works running only on the CPU or built-in graphics. Not much of a "debate" there.
But the LEVEL of performance, or satisfaction you get with it, is subjective.
Someone may also argue that the SSD is the problem, since their performance can "wobble" over time, after X number of read/write cycles.
Anyway, I think the reason you aren't getting a straight answer is that the straightest answer is "maybe." Sorry!
Tedster, I'm not running Eyefinity I'm each monitor independently. I prefer to have a what ever I'm focusing on full screen on my center monitor (like Minecraft or Cad) and then have other programs like IRC, VLC, Chrome or what have you full screen on the other two. I've tried running minecraft solely on my center monitor with no other programs running as well as with other programs running (complete shutdowns in between each time of course). I did notice a slight drop in FPS with other programs running but nothing significant.
I get the feeling its my GPU because my FPS drops horrifically under ground and when moving above ground. If I'm idling on the surface I get around 100-120 FPS which is great. But as soon as i start to move around it drops to around 45-60 (again not too bad). But when I'm underground (in a fully lit tunnel with nothing below light level 10) my FPS never can climb above 55 even and when I move around it routinely drops to the 25-40 FPS range.
The thing that confuses me is when I have Catalyst Control Center pulled up with only minecraft running my usage readily stays at 0% and occasionally jumps to 25-27% for a short time before dropping to 0% again. I cant imagine my processor is struggling to keep up but the limited GPU activity is really leaving me puzzled if a new GPU would be worth the investment or if there's a configuration issue that is causing me trouble.
I am running Java 7u7x64 and my FPS doesn't seem to be affected by if the game is in full screen or windowed.
Ahh, yes, I've seen those contradictory threads, too. Has something to do with it being written in Java, as opposed to being written to utilize something like the Unreal engine, which is optimized for a GPU.
However, the normal logic usually applies: a GPU will assist the CPU, and thus help it. So it's better than not having one. The amount of benefit will be dependent on RAM, CPU power, GPU power, and your game settings.
Adding a mod like Optifine will also help ensure the GPU is used, or at least not ignored, further offering some relaxation to your CPU.
What you need to do is force MC to give priority to the GPU... similar to setting CPU affinity. I know you can lower the affinity for MC and tell it to apply less cores, in the hope that it will then use the GPU instead, but that could cause problems, too. I'm not sure how to manually switch affinity from the CPU to the GPU... or if that is even possible. I hope someone smarter than me can chime in with the specifics.
That's what I'm thinking may be the issue, that the GPU currently is being ignored all together. I found a post on how to configure an AMD/ATI Graphics card for Minecraft (kept finding Nvidia ones and this is so far the only one I could find for AMD/ATI). I'm going to try and tweak my GPU settings tonight and see if it helps. At the moment my GPU is set to use the program settings, which I think Minecraft is only utilizing the CPU and the GPU is going along with it. But with these settings in Catalyst Control Center it should force Minecraft to use the GPU instead of defaulting to the CPU only.
Will post later tonight with my results. Fingers crossed!
MC itself does not have control over this. You should also be aware that multiple manufacturers have shipped systems that just do not support Open GL on their switchable graphics systems. In this case there may or may not be a manual control to force the dedicated GPU to be used at all times.
Another thing to check out, since you mentioned low FPS while moving, is that some systems do not support the Advanced Open GL functionality (occlusion culling) in hardware. If you are on a system that emulates this in the driver software, then enabling Advanced Open GL will reduce your performance. Net-Net, if Advanced Open GL is on, try turning it off. If it is off, try turning in on.
I did a sanity check with GPU-Z and when running MC my GPU is working. I'm going to have to do some more digging into my setup to see if there is anything else that could be dropping frames since theres no reason it should be with this hardware that I can think of.
Maybe I'll get luckily in the mean time and Mojang will end up contracting with Optifine and bake there optimizations into vanilla MC :).
PS, from what I read a while back, mojang contacted the dev of optifine, but they could not reach an agreement so for now it will stay a separate mod
Ahh I thought that the Advanced OpenGL enabled OpenGL in general. I read something a while back from Valve that they found OpenGL to be more efficient than Direct Xhttp://www.extremetech.com/gaming/133824-valve-opengl-is-faster-than-directx-even-on-windows hopefully other game makers start to realize it and OpenGL starts getting some love.
Looking at GPUz in the overworld my GPU load is seems to bounce between 25-35% and shows 850MB of dedicated memory usage. In the Nether the GPU load is higher staying around 45% but I get around 30FPS more then I do in the overworld. Also my CPU usage seems to average out to be around 30-35% so the CPU is not maxed out either. I don't think its the SSD because frames improved some when I upgraded to it. I do have a mechanical drive in my PC as well so I can move it to there and see if that helps any.
There was something I saw about Oracle and AMD teaming up to modify Java to taking better advantage of the GPU a well as multicore processors so maybe in a year or two minecraft will magically get a little better from a better java runtime implementation haha