My computer isn't what you would call a "potato"; it's technically a gaming computer, but it's probably the lowest quality gaming computer out there. It's a really gourmet potato. Upon loading chunks in 1.18, my framerate gets horrendously ugly. Every chunk that's loaded causes a lag spike and flying around in Creative Mode forces my computer into a crawl. And walking around already-loaded chunks does produce some noticeable tear here and there. I really wanted to enjoy the new terrain generation and underground, but it's hard to do when the game basically turns into a slide show, and I can hear my CPU crying from my computer case.
I already know why this is: it's because the world height has essentially doubled in size, and so have the chunks, so it has to load much more. But I haven't heard anyone else having lag problems? Does every other Minecraft player except me have an RTX 3090 and I'm just not aware or something?
Anyways, I don't even think Optifine will be able to get rid of all the lag. It's good, but not that good.
Say something silly, Laugh 'til it hurts, Take a risk, Sing out loud, Rock the boat, Shake things up, Flirt with disaster, Buy something frivolous, Color outside the lines, Cause a scene, Order dessert, Make waves, Get carried away, Have a great day!
One thing that should be noted is that it seems that by default, multiple CPU cores will be utilized when generating chunks in order to handle the extra intensiveness of the new terrain generation. It seems that Minecraft is using more CPU cores (and RAM too) than before. What this means is that if your computer doesn't have many cores or not a lot of RAM, then performance may be noticeably slower than before. You can increase the amount of RAM allocated to Minecraft using JVM arguments (by default it uses 2GB), but there is not much you can do about the CPU cores short of getting a beefier computer. (You can try closing every app and webpage that's open in the background).
I similarly have a low-tier gaming laptop. My RAM is upgraded to 32GB but the rest of the hardware isn't necessarily up to the same level so I probably have more RAM than is useful for me.
My game ran smoothly before the update but like yours, with the new update it is lagging horribly when loading new chunks. I messed around with my game settings and turning the render distance way down seemed to help quite a bit. I wasn't satisfied with not being able to see far so I turned the simulation distance all the way to the minimum and it seemed to run even better. I then tried turning the render distance to the maximum with the simulation distance still all the way down and it still ran very smoothly.
Try turning your simulation distance all the way down, hopefully this helps you.
Most multiplayer servers haven't updated to 1.18 yet. Therefore if you mainly player on multiplayer servers, then switch back to 1.17.1 until these four mods (which do a better job at increasing your FPS than Optifine, however lack stuff such as shaders, emissive textures, better grass, etc.) called Sodium, Lithium, Phosphor and Hydrogen (weird name choices ngl) update to 1.18. They're for Fabric FYI.
Are those four mods made by the same person or team of people? They're all named after elements (except for phosphor, but it's still named after a substance). They have to be, their names are just too similar.
I only have 4 cores. It feels like 1.18 really did abandon the lower-tier computer users. It's not a bad thing; the world height had to be increased at some point. It's just kinda sad.
I only have 4 cores. It feels like 1.18 really did abandon the lower-tier computer users. It's not a bad thing; the world height had to be increased at some point. It's just kinda sad.
I think four cores should still be good enough in most instances. Most modern CPUs from Intel and AMD have hyper threading, which means that that each physical core can carry out two sequences of instructions (called threads) in parallel. So if your CPU has 4 physical cores, you effectively have 8 logical cores (threads) that your computer can use. I don't know what model CPU your computer has, but this is something you can look up. Now if by 4 cores you mean it has 4 threads (logical cores) then yeah that will probably bottleneck the gameplay, but only really when you're moving fast and generating lots of chunks.
If I'm flying around in creative to intentionally try and generate new chunks as quickly as possibly with a render distance of 20, I can see that my machine uses roughly 5-6 threads. If I'm not moving fast it usually uses maybe 1-2. The bigger bottleneck is probably the RAM if you are using the default RAM allocation that Minecraft uses. This is something that you can change without getting a new computer or upgrading it. It's just a JVM argument you can use. When I updated my private server to 1.18, I had to upgrade the RAM the server host was providing because 2GB just wasn't enough to handle generating all the new caves and terrain without crashing. Then I upgraded to 4GB and it seemed to do just fine.
The lack of optimization and resource usage of newer versions is beyond incomprehensible; I had no issues playing on a world with sea level set to y=191, which has to be much higher than the average ground level in 1.18, and 4 times the volume of caves of vanilla 1.6.4, which itself had significantly more caves than 1.7-1.17 (and for all I know it still has more in terms of air blocks as a percentage of the underground, and either way lots of smaller tunnels have a much larger surface area than a large open cave of the same volume, which impacts rendering performance and VRAM usage) - on a computer with mid-2000s hardware and a 32 bit OS with only 768 MB allocated to the game, which used less than half that (I normally only allocate 512 MB, even now) - and 1.6.4 doesn't have any real multithreading at all (world generation has actually been multithreaded since 1.13 with dozens of threads being used; e.g. search for "worldgen-worker" in this crash report from 1.13.2), aside from separate client/server threads in singleplayer and networking and chunk saving:
Note my remarks about how bad performance was in newer versions, especially 1.8 and later, and this is one reason I've never updated to newer versions, newer computers notwithstanding as by then I'd already taken to making my own "updates", aka mods.
The worst thing is that Mojang simply doesn't care; they mark bug reports as invalid or try to give some excuse or tell you to buy a new computer:
Apparently, the overuse of features present in newer versions of Java is one culprit (IDK what a "lamda" is exactly as 1.6.4 uses Java 6), as is an overly object-oriented mindset in general (e.g. in 1.8 they came up with the crazy idea to encapsulate all coordinates in a "blockpos" object, of which millions can be created and discarded every tick/frame, apparently because this is the "proper" way to write code these days):
MC-173001 Minecraft Memory (Leaks/Issues)
If you "HAVE" to use a Lambda. Cache it and Reuse it, that way you have 1 allocation and a smaller performance hit, because a lambda is slower then or equal calling everything via reflection.
More features is also not a valid explanation; I've seen no increase in memory/CPU usage over vanilla, and even reduced it with my own optimizations (of which there were very few in the case of THT, aside from how I generated the additional 128 layers of terrain so the game did not need to generate more noise, the most expensive part of world generation, and back then I used Forge for some other mods and Forge by itself is quite inefficient) in TMCW after adding hundreds of new blocks/items/biomes/entities/etc, which is consistent with what JVM profilers show to be using the most resources (chunk data, which is only affected by the number of loaded blocks/chunk sections, not the number of different blocks).
I think four cores should still be good enough in most instances. Most modern CPUs from Intel and AMD have hyper threading, which means that that each physical core can carry out two sequences of instructions (called threads) in parallel. So if your CPU has 4 physical cores, you effectively have 8 logical cores (threads) that your computer can use. I don't know what model CPU your computer has, but this is something you can look up. Now if by 4 cores you mean it has 4 threads (logical cores) then yeah that will probably bottleneck the gameplay, but only really when you're moving fast and generating lots of chunks.
If you take the overall rating and divide it by the single-thread rating you get the equivalent of 7 physical cores, not 12, as each pair of virtual cores has to share resources between them, as well as with the rest of the system - even non-hyperthreaded CPUs will not be able to fully utilize every core at the same time due to memory bandwidth and cache bottlenecks (all cores share the same data bus and level 3 cache). Also, the maximum "turbo" clock and single thread rating only applies if as little as a single core is being used (perhaps more in higher core count CPUs) as they would overheat if every core was running at full capacity, and in the end the thread that bottlenecks will be the one that limits overall performance.
The game may also be using too many threads, even for higher-end CPUs; I've seen thread dumps that lists dozens of individual "worldgen-worker" threads (world generation has been multithreaded since 1.13 so claims that it has only been since 1.18 are false), each one appearing to be generating a single chunk, which is absurd - there is overhead involved when the CPU has to switch between threads, and if the game were properly optimized a single thread would be enough, at least for singleplayer (even in the most demanding situation I see a server tick time of less than 10 ms, 1/5 of the maximum allowed, when flying around in Creative - and 1.6.4 has practically no server-side multithreading aside from chunk saving and networking (most of the time spent on worldgen in the example is on lighting calculations due to the giant trees, which is much more intensive than the actual terrain generation; notably, lighting itself was multithreaded in 1.14, whereas I just optimized it).
That said, lag spikes are likely more due to rendering, not world generation itself, unless as mentioned above thread contention is causing issues - 1.15+ has known issues with reduced rendering performance and chunk updates are the single biggest cause of lag spikes, aside from garbage collection cycles:
MC-123584 Updating blocks creates lag spikes proportional to geometry in chunk section (caves filled with plants and dripstone will worsen this issue; each "crossed squares" block is equivalent to 4 normal block faces as each plane has to be rendered twice so they can be seen from both sides; likewise, some people reported that the new oceans in 1.13 caused lag, which is again due to all the plants in them)
Unfortunately, they marked the first report as invalid, much as they did with an older report for 1.8, which tells you to lower settings or upgrade your hardware, which gives you an idea of what they think about these issues (at least the second one is still open but the others are about a more general performance degradation, which IMO is more serious):
My computer isn't what you would call a "potato"; it's technically a gaming computer, but it's probably the lowest quality gaming computer out there. It's a really gourmet potato. Upon loading chunks in 1.18, my framerate gets horrendously ugly. Every chunk that's loaded causes a lag spike and flying around in Creative Mode forces my computer into a crawl. And walking around already-loaded chunks does produce some noticeable tear here and there. I really wanted to enjoy the new terrain generation and underground, but it's hard to do when the game basically turns into a slide show, and I can hear my CPU crying from my computer case.
I already know why this is: it's because the world height has essentially doubled in size, and so have the chunks, so it has to load much more. But I haven't heard anyone else having lag problems? Does every other Minecraft player except me have an RTX 3090 and I'm just not aware or something?
Anyways, I don't even think Optifine will be able to get rid of all the lag. It's good, but not that good.
Will I be stuck in 1.17.1 forever?
Post a screenshot with F3 enabled and your JVM arguments.
Post your DxDiag log here. https://minecrafthopper.net/help/pixel-format-not-accelerated/support/#dxdiag
One thing that should be noted is that it seems that by default, multiple CPU cores will be utilized when generating chunks in order to handle the extra intensiveness of the new terrain generation. It seems that Minecraft is using more CPU cores (and RAM too) than before. What this means is that if your computer doesn't have many cores or not a lot of RAM, then performance may be noticeably slower than before. You can increase the amount of RAM allocated to Minecraft using JVM arguments (by default it uses 2GB), but there is not much you can do about the CPU cores short of getting a beefier computer. (You can try closing every app and webpage that's open in the background).
I similarly have a low-tier gaming laptop. My RAM is upgraded to 32GB but the rest of the hardware isn't necessarily up to the same level so I probably have more RAM than is useful for me.
My game ran smoothly before the update but like yours, with the new update it is lagging horribly when loading new chunks. I messed around with my game settings and turning the render distance way down seemed to help quite a bit. I wasn't satisfied with not being able to see far so I turned the simulation distance all the way to the minimum and it seemed to run even better. I then tried turning the render distance to the maximum with the simulation distance still all the way down and it still ran very smoothly.
Try turning your simulation distance all the way down, hopefully this helps you.
Alright, thanks for the advice.
Most multiplayer servers haven't updated to 1.18 yet. Therefore if you mainly player on multiplayer servers, then switch back to 1.17.1 until these four mods (which do a better job at increasing your FPS than Optifine, however lack stuff such as shaders, emissive textures, better grass, etc.) called Sodium, Lithium, Phosphor and Hydrogen (weird name choices ngl) update to 1.18. They're for Fabric FYI.
Are those four mods made by the same person or team of people? They're all named after elements (except for phosphor, but it's still named after a substance). They have to be, their names are just too similar.
I only have 4 cores. It feels like 1.18 really did abandon the lower-tier computer users. It's not a bad thing; the world height had to be increased at some point. It's just kinda sad.
Sodium, Lithium and Phosphor are made by the same person. Not sure about Hydrogen though.
I only have 4 cores. It feels like 1.18 really did abandon the lower-tier computer users. It's not a bad thing; the world height had to be increased at some point. It's just kinda sad.
I think four cores should still be good enough in most instances. Most modern CPUs from Intel and AMD have hyper threading, which means that that each physical core can carry out two sequences of instructions (called threads) in parallel. So if your CPU has 4 physical cores, you effectively have 8 logical cores (threads) that your computer can use. I don't know what model CPU your computer has, but this is something you can look up. Now if by 4 cores you mean it has 4 threads (logical cores) then yeah that will probably bottleneck the gameplay, but only really when you're moving fast and generating lots of chunks.
If I'm flying around in creative to intentionally try and generate new chunks as quickly as possibly with a render distance of 20, I can see that my machine uses roughly 5-6 threads. If I'm not moving fast it usually uses maybe 1-2. The bigger bottleneck is probably the RAM if you are using the default RAM allocation that Minecraft uses. This is something that you can change without getting a new computer or upgrading it. It's just a JVM argument you can use. When I updated my private server to 1.18, I had to upgrade the RAM the server host was providing because 2GB just wasn't enough to handle generating all the new caves and terrain without crashing. Then I upgraded to 4GB and it seemed to do just fine.
The lack of optimization and resource usage of newer versions is beyond incomprehensible; I had no issues playing on a world with sea level set to y=191, which has to be much higher than the average ground level in 1.18, and 4 times the volume of caves of vanilla 1.6.4, which itself had significantly more caves than 1.7-1.17 (and for all I know it still has more in terms of air blocks as a percentage of the underground, and either way lots of smaller tunnels have a much larger surface area than a large open cave of the same volume, which impacts rendering performance and VRAM usage) - on a computer with mid-2000s hardware and a 32 bit OS with only 768 MB allocated to the game, which used less than half that (I normally only allocate 512 MB, even now) - and 1.6.4 doesn't have any real multithreading at all (world generation has actually been multithreaded since 1.13 with dozens of threads being used; e.g. search for "worldgen-worker" in this crash report from 1.13.2), aside from separate client/server threads in singleplayer and networking and chunk saving:
A world with ~3.5 times the normal ground depth (this is between sea level and cave lava level, which is 52 layers in vanilla and 185 in THT)
Ravines and caves in "TripleHeightTerrain" (128 blocks deeper underground than vanilla) (images taken underground)
The hardware that I had at the time I played on this world:
https://www.minecraftforum.net/forums/minecraft-java-edition/discussion/3010883-you-can-play-minecraft-on-this-kind-of-pc?comment=2
Note my remarks about how bad performance was in newer versions, especially 1.8 and later, and this is one reason I've never updated to newer versions, newer computers notwithstanding as by then I'd already taken to making my own "updates", aka mods.
The worst thing is that Mojang simply doesn't care; they mark bug reports as invalid or try to give some excuse or tell you to buy a new computer:
More features is also not a valid explanation; I've seen no increase in memory/CPU usage over vanilla, and even reduced it with my own optimizations (of which there were very few in the case of THT, aside from how I generated the additional 128 layers of terrain so the game did not need to generate more noise, the most expensive part of world generation, and back then I used Forge for some other mods and Forge by itself is quite inefficient) in TMCW after adding hundreds of new blocks/items/biomes/entities/etc, which is consistent with what JVM profilers show to be using the most resources (chunk data, which is only affected by the number of loaded blocks/chunk sections, not the number of different blocks).
TheMasterCaver's First World - possibly the most caved-out world in Minecraft history - includes world download.
TheMasterCaver's World - my own version of Minecraft largely based on my views of how the game should have evolved since 1.6.4.
Why do I still play in 1.6.4?
I have a Ryzen 3 2300X, if that helps.
Ah yes, that CPU has 4 cores, 4 threads so I can see how that could cause performance issues.
Hyperthreading is not the same as having twice as many cores; for example:
If you take the overall rating and divide it by the single-thread rating you get the equivalent of 7 physical cores, not 12, as each pair of virtual cores has to share resources between them, as well as with the rest of the system - even non-hyperthreaded CPUs will not be able to fully utilize every core at the same time due to memory bandwidth and cache bottlenecks (all cores share the same data bus and level 3 cache). Also, the maximum "turbo" clock and single thread rating only applies if as little as a single core is being used (perhaps more in higher core count CPUs) as they would overheat if every core was running at full capacity, and in the end the thread that bottlenecks will be the one that limits overall performance.
The game may also be using too many threads, even for higher-end CPUs; I've seen thread dumps that lists dozens of individual "worldgen-worker" threads (world generation has been multithreaded since 1.13 so claims that it has only been since 1.18 are false), each one appearing to be generating a single chunk, which is absurd - there is overhead involved when the CPU has to switch between threads, and if the game were properly optimized a single thread would be enough, at least for singleplayer (even in the most demanding situation I see a server tick time of less than 10 ms, 1/5 of the maximum allowed, when flying around in Creative - and 1.6.4 has practically no server-side multithreading aside from chunk saving and networking (most of the time spent on worldgen in the example is on lighting calculations due to the giant trees, which is much more intensive than the actual terrain generation; notably, lighting itself was multithreaded in 1.14, whereas I just optimized it).
That said, lag spikes are likely more due to rendering, not world generation itself, unless as mentioned above thread contention is causing issues - 1.15+ has known issues with reduced rendering performance and chunk updates are the single biggest cause of lag spikes, aside from garbage collection cycles:
MC-164123 Poor FPS performance with new rendering engine
MC-123584 Updating blocks creates lag spikes proportional to geometry in chunk section (caves filled with plants and dripstone will worsen this issue; each "crossed squares" block is equivalent to 4 normal block faces as each plane has to be rendered twice so they can be seen from both sides; likewise, some people reported that the new oceans in 1.13 caused lag, which is again due to all the plants in them)
Unfortunately, they marked the first report as invalid, much as they did with an older report for 1.8, which tells you to lower settings or upgrade your hardware, which gives you an idea of what they think about these issues (at least the second one is still open but the others are about a more general performance degradation, which IMO is more serious):
MC-45458 Framerate drop/lag in 1.8 for some hardware setups
TheMasterCaver's First World - possibly the most caved-out world in Minecraft history - includes world download.
TheMasterCaver's World - my own version of Minecraft largely based on my views of how the game should have evolved since 1.6.4.
Why do I still play in 1.6.4?