By Timothy Lickteig On 2023-10-14

Trying to get the most fun out of a low end computer can be frustrating. Luckily, there are a multitude of settings we can tweak that will vastly improve our game performance without making the game look ugly. Most of this will be based off of my own personal experience, however I will also be documenting how much each of these settings impact performance on my little laptop, which has an AMD Ryzen 5 7530U with Radeon Graphics, 8 GB of RAM, and a 2TB SSD. It's a pretty solid midrange offering (aside from the upgraded SSD that I put into it), which one might very well might want to play Minecraft on casually, even on reduced settings.

VSync

In my experience, this is usually the biggest thing that I turn off when I find that I need to reduce the settings. VSync locks the framerate of your game to the refresh rate to your monitor, meaning that you are artificially limiting the performance of your computer's graphics processor. On lower ended hardware this can cause stuttering since the graphics card is constantly going in between waiting around for your monitor to refresh, and trying to pump out as many frames of video that it can. Turning this off can lead to screen tearing however, and I have seen it get pretty significant too. Still though, usually I prefer to trade a bit of screen tearing for a good amount of extra performance.

To test out this theory, I fired up Minecraft on my laptop. I found a woodland mansion, and run around inside of it. With Vsync on, I was getting around 30-60 FPS depending on the amount of movement on the screen. Could definitely do worse, however when I turned off VSync, it shot up to 100-150 FPS! That being said however, there were some pretty harsh FPS spikes and tearing, but I was able to fix both of those problems using the next things that I am going to mention.

The framerate limiter

If you have spent any time within the circles of the PC Master Race, you have definitely have had the virtues of a high framerate extoled onto you like some weird deity. While that is mostly true, you also want to want to avoid a concept called microstuttering. This happens when the average framerate is high, yet the game still does not feel smooth because of significant swings in the current framerate. I was experiencing that when I had VSync off. I was nearly cracking 200fps yet still having stuttering. Seems counterintuitive, but the framerate limiter is the super easy and straightforward way to solve the problem.

Going back to the game then, I went ahead and set the maximum framerate to 60FPS. Doing this finally got the game to run buttery smooth on my little laptop. Even better, it mostly got rid of the screen tearing too! This is because the refresh rate of the display is 60HZ, so locking the framerate at 60FPS naturally syncs the Graphics processor with the display. Regardless of how this is accomplished however, what matters is that this setting makes the performace consistent across many different scenarios, which is crucial to optimizing your playing experience.

The Render Distance

How much this next setting impacts performance will primarily be based on how much system memory and VRAM that your computer has. When I was younger and trying to get Minecraft to run on whatever computer I could get my hands on, this is the setting that I frequently ended up turning down to make the game playable. When tweaking this setting, I generally prefer to start at high, and then slowly work my way down until the framerate is where I want it.

As an example, let's crank the render distance all the way up to a maximum of 32 chunks. Currently the game is running at a fairly poultry 18-25 FPS. If we stand still the FPS will pick up to around 30-40. Overall I would consider that barely playable.

Now, I will decrease the render distance to 25 chunks. The game now runs at around 40 FPS, although there are some pretty wild swings, so I'm not really satisfied yet.

Lastly, I will decrease the render distance down to 16 chunks. Finally, the game starts really running great. there is still a bit of swing in framerate, however it only barely drops below 60 FPS. It'll be different for every computer obviously, however you can generally use that same tactic to find your optimal render distance, or go in reverse; i.e. starting at a really low render distance and slowly working your way up until the framerate starts to chug.

Conclusion

In conclusion, I hope that this article teaches you that tweaking your settings is a much better way to achieve better performance than simply just blowing tons of money on new hardware. Every computer is different, so tweaking your settings to be tailored to your hardware goes a long way, even if it is a high end system. In addition, there are many other video settings you can try that will have their own unique impact on how the game runs on your specific computer. So it is worth the time to take 10 minutes or so in a new installation to play around in the video settings to get the game running exactly to your liking.

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