Minecraft Forums

I adore this game, but have never been able to get it to run smoothly/ well. I don't know enough to describe the problem, except to say that it is jumpy, as though running at a low fps. When exploring, it takes forever to load chunks, and even when traversing old territory they often don't load until I'm nearly on them. Can anyone help?

System:
MS Windows XP Professional, SP3
Intel P4 3.2GHz
2GB RAM
NVIDIA GeForce 6200
Java 1.7.0_09
Minecraft 1.4.2

Thanks in advance for your help. It's driving me away from playing this game right now

Quote from mesmashh

You should atlest being using a dual core for minecraft, Minecraft works better on 64 Bit platform i think your computer is out of date for minecraft. Minecraft is a very high draw program for your CPU RAM and video card. You may need to lower your video settings in minecraft or you also may want to try to use less RAM for minecraft i been reading where lowering the amount of RAM minecraft uses you may see a improvement.

Umm, you want to INCREASE the amount of Ram available to minecraft.

OT: the easiest way is optifine! no other mods required, and will boost FPS, speed chunk loading, and is highly configurable!

Here:

http://www.minecraftforum.net/topic/249637-142-optifine-hd-a7-fps-boost-hd-textures-aa-af-and-much-more/

(also allows HD texture packs, I believe).

Quote from mesmashh

I been reading where if you have a low end computer by decreasing the ram needed for minecraft to run it reduces the amount it reads and rewrites from the hard drive and probley from the spec's of his or hers computer it has a IDE hard drive with a slow transfer speed. I yet have to test this out all though.

You are completely right. In many cases, larger ram allocation will cause page-file thrashing and that is something to be avoided at all costs.

Quote from Ankenmann2

Cores =/= performance

He's got a P4. Obviously this doesn't always hold true, but in this case, it definitely does. With a P4 he is likely CPU-bound, especially during chunk loading. The only fixes are 1. the Optifine mod 2. using a RAMdisk (probably not a good option here) or 3. a new PC.

Operating system is only Windows XP professional. I've seen those computers at public places, and they lag really bad. They're like 13 years old. Only 2GBs of RAM is really low. Even at 4GBs of RAM it lags in snow biomes and big buildings. Who makes your computer?

Thanks for everyone's suggestions. To benchmark, when running around on the surface, normal exploration kind of stuff, I get between 1 and 20 fps. Often down in 2-5 range which is the problem I'm asking for help with.

I uninstalled a ton of software today, including minecraft, reinstalled MC, downloaded magiclauncher 1.0 and optifine 1.4.2 HD. Fired up MC and it's still down into the 2-5 fps a lot. Launched via magiclauncher, same result. Added the optifine mod via magiclauncher, and NOW I have a new problem:

When trying to run with optifine, my character just falls. It starts to load a few clouds or whatever, the character sinks, everything goes dark, and I just watch the Y coordinate go through -2000, -3000... Just keeps going. I'd love your help getting this to work, if optifine will make MC run smoothly, I'm all game.

Sounds like a chunk loading issue. Not really sure what could be causing it... Make sure you are set to the recommended optifine settings. Also try a new world to see if the old one may be corrupted in some way.