Minecraft Forums

So, I made this custom mod pack recently and it was very slow. My FPS was usually around 16-24. I needed something to run it faster. I had already installed Optifine, BetterFPS, and Fastcraft, which did not help as much as I would have liked. The post that changed my playing experience can be found here: http://www.mcgamer.net/threads/ultimate-minecraft-fps-increase-guide.40681/

Now most of these I either didn't need to do, couldn't do, or already did. But there were two things on the list that I'd never even heard of, #2 & #4. Now I get a steady 40 FPS no lag with 150 mods.

#2 is a program that will stop all background programs until you are done playing.

#4 is the one that I think helped me the most. I had a lot of junk in there.

My Mods (for the curious):

Good Luck!

Incoming wall of text. Just addressing the tips on that site. Not only for you, but also anyone stopping by.

1. Optifine only helps if you actually play around with the settings. Optifine won't automagically fix problems by being installed. Optifine opens the settings up more than Mojang intended so you can either allow your system to excel, or help your system by sacrificing some visual quality. If your system is running well with say 100 FPS or so (and you've only got a 60Hz monitor, so 40 FPS is essentially being wasted), you can spend that extra FPS on upping the render distance past what Mojang allows, enabling connected textures, anti-aliasing and anisotropic filtering, mip-mapping, etc to really give a boost to your Minecraft experience graphically speaking while shaving FPS off (but, you have enough, so you can afford it). However, on the opposite end of the spectrum, if you're getting 10 FPS you can drop the settings way down past what vanilla allows you get some extra frames at the cost of the game looking worse. Remove fog (fog isn't a performance-improver, the reduced render distance is, fog is intended to help smooth out the transition between rendered and unrendered chunks so it looks visually pleasing, and itself reduces FPS a tiny bit, still, any bit helps), turn off specific particle effects and animations, force certain things to use certain ways of rendering (remove the biome colouring of grass and leaves, remove rain and snow effects, etc), use optimised but slightly less visually pleasing mathematical algorithms and rendering tricks dubbed "Fast ___" (one particular settings gives a couple more FPS but results in some Z-fighting where two things render on top of each other and fight), etc.

2. GameBooster and other programs may work, but otherwise honestly can just be uninstalled. Most of the changes they make aren't game-specific and don't require the program, any user can spend maybe 5 minutes doing some tweaks to get the same outcome, if not a better outcome. Switch to a high performance power setting (or I have a custom one which saves charge when is using the battery, but turns everything to quality and high performance mode when it's on charge), open up MS Config (Task Manager IIRC for Windows 8 and maybe Windows 10) and tweak the startup settings to remove program entries and stop pesky programs from starting on boot, close down CPU, RAM, disk and GPU intensive applications like Chrome or Skype when starting a game, etc. My own experience has been that GameBooster provides a 1 or 2 FPS increase, if even, even on underpowered $200 netbooks with dual core processors and absolutely horrific Intel GMA GPUs which are worse than Intel HD GPUs.

3. Can't argue against that, except in some cases (AMD in particular often has buggy driver updates, but that seems to be changing somewhat now by the looks of things). Developers patch bugs, improve performance and even work hand-in-hand with developers to dedicate entire updates to making a specific game perform better.

4. I don't think this helps at all. Firstly, these aren't stored in RAM, they may be cached in RAM, but the files you see in the temporary folder are not in RAM. You can't see files in RAM through a file explorer unless you're using a RAM disk, which is another piece of software that creates a unique device and partition where contents are stored in RAM. Either way, the files you delete are stored on your drive just like any other file, except that when Windows shuts down, those files are removed (or should be flagged for removal), and are usually used to store data for later use where space in RAM would be wasted keeping the data. If you delete these, it's basically just removing the sheets of paper you've got tucked away neatly on the desk, it gives you more space, but doesn't improve performance unless the problem(s) stem(s) from low disk space.

5. This. As said before, some programs use up resources ranging from CPU usage and CPU time, RAM, GPU usage, disk for IO, etc. The more resources your computer is using in total, the less total free space your computer has to execute more instructions and churn through more data, and the longer it takes for a given instruction to be executed. Chrome often likes to churn through CPU cycles and eat into RAM (same with Firefox as well), Skype is notorious for being a decent quality voice communication and VOIP program, but eats into system resources and networking, and a copy operation requires a lot of IO operations taking a temporary toll on disk usage.

6. Page file. Never, ever, ever, ever, EVER, change this. Let Windows handle it. This is perhaps one of the biggest misconceptions and pieces of bad advice that anyone can give to customise Windows to pure performance. Your page file is basically a spot in which data can overflow into when physical memory is used up, if physical memory, ie RAM, is full, it can overflow into the page file so your computer won't just lock up on you, but, for a big hit to performance. Your page file is exactly as it sounds, it's a hidden and protected system file that only retains data for that particular session (unless you tell it not to and retain data outright) that exists on your disk. It's a file on your C: drive, I'm not 100% sure the exact path, but it exists on the C: drive. Now how it works is basically like this. Program data basically exist on "pages" of sorts, rather than just in random locations in RAM. This allows one program to not affect anything else in case it screws up, intentionally or unintentionally. What happens is Windows will move programs that either have a low priority (low or background), or when RAM is full, will systematically move them into paging memory, making room in physical memory to avoid things locking up. It's a back-up measure.

Do. Not. Set it to anything else other than just let Windows take care of it. The reason why is if you set it to anything else, whether it be no paging file or a fixed paging file size, what happens if the page file runs out of room or flat out doesn't exist? Your computer will in all likelihood crash on you, causing more damage that could have been prevented if you left Windows to handle it itself. Windows intelligently increases and decreases the page file size based on the current needs. If it needs more space, it allocates itself more space and lets itself grow, if there's excess free space, it'll shrink itself to reduce used space. Leave it. Don't touch it, you'll do more harm than good.

I didn't watch the first video past that, I skipped through and found nothing else that I had to cover. Second video I skipped entirely. Page file is the only important thing.

7. Defragmentation is a funny one. Defragmentation can help performance, but only tends to help on drives that are either HEAVILY used in multiple situations by multiple programs, or are incredibly old (I'm talking years old). Basically, on a hard drive your data is basically stored like a long list. Files are stored like this, let's say we have 3 files, files 1, 2 and 3. File 1 has 5 parts, file 2 has 2 parts and file 3 has 12 parts, and we'll name these part A through n, where N is the corresponding letter mapping to the last part index, so for file 1 would be 'E', file 2 would be 'B', file 3 would be 'L'. These 3 files on a typical hard drive are stored like this:

1A, 1B, 1C, 1D, 1E, 2A, 2B, 3A, 3B, 3C, 3D, 3E, 3F, 3G, 3H, 3I, 3J, 3K, 3L

Lets say we delete file 2. What doesn't happen is the file is removed and file 3 is bumped up. Instead what happens is the file is removed and the extra space is left empty. So it becomes:

1A, 1B, 1C, 1D, 1E, Empty, Empty, 3A, 3B, 3C, 3D, 3E, 3F, 3G, 3H, 3I, 3J, 3K, 3L

Now, you add a 4th file with 7 parts:

1A, 1B, 1C, 1D, 1E, 4A, 4B, 3A, 3B, 3C, 3D, 3E, 3F, 3G, 3H, 3I, 3J, 3K, 3L, 4C, 4D, 4E, 4F, 4G

You see how the file is split? The first two parts are where file 2 was, the last 5 parts are right at the end. On a hard drive, this would mean the read/write head physically has to move to a different location whenever it wants to read file 4. Apply this system to a general computer user's drive and you'll see the absolute mess that is the file system. This is called fragmentation, and the reason why it affects performance is the head has to jump back and forward so many times, sometimes right around to the other side of the platter (of course, the platter instead spins to that location, or rather the head waits until it's at the location), which if you have trillions of files with together perhaps quadrillions of small parts scattered around the place can make even an uber computer drop to it's knees if it's that bad.

Defragmentation basically reads each file and moves it to it's own location elsewhere temporarily, then once free space is available, moves the first file back, and it does this for the majority of files on your drive if you want it to. It takes an otherwise insanely messy block of random parts of random files and orders it in one nice list, so when you want to watch that movie, the drive just has to go bang bang bang bang bang bang bang bang and read EVERY bit of data one after another in the same location rather than jump around the place.

8. Can't argue with that.

9. Can help.

10. This helps massively. This can bring an otherwise 20 FPS game all the way to 60 FPS constantly if you drop the window size / resolution down far enough. Basically, more pixels means more work for your computer to do, much more work actually, meaning more lag.

11. I'd presume and I've heard that this doesn't help much unless the issue is to do with video memory. Of which doesn't occur that often.

12. This is the biggest misconception in not only Minecraft, but also computing in general. Ask the average computer user what the easiest upgrade is that will get better performance, 9 times out of 10 I bet they'll say "add more memory". Right and wrong. More RAM only helps when you actually need more RAM, if you're an average computer user doing taxes in Excel, surfing Facebook, watching Youtube or watching a HD movie, you have absolutely no need for 16 gigabytes of memory. You won't ever use 16GB, you'll very likely not use 8GB or 4GB even. Minecraft is no exception.

If you hit F3 and look at the amount of memory it's using currently, that's just it, the amount of memory that game is using, and that's the guide you should go off for how much to allocate. I've shown that even with 512MB of memory allocated, on 1.8.7 with default settings and an NVIDIA GeForce 840M, I still maintain 100+ FPS on default resolution, since the vanilla game in my experience only ever used ~300 to 400 MB of memory, 512MB is just fine. Mods can push that up (some will argue this, but I've personally experienced about 1GB to 1.5GB of memory being used with ~200+ mods of a total of 4GB allocated). Otherwise, allocating more RAM doesn't help unless the problem is actually RAM-related. 9 times out of 10, it ain't.