By Timothy Lickteig On 2023-08-17

The short answer is yes, and I've got a midrange laptop to prove it. The reason why however is a bit nuanced, and I'll be getting to it later on in this article.

First, lets meet our test mule. This is a brand new HP Envy x360 that I bought a few weeks ago, and will do perfect for a test like this, since it's a computer that one might casually want to play a few games on, even if that is simply one of many roles that the laptop fulfills. Optimization is really important here, since these users will not be shelling out lots of money to upgrade their hardware, just to play a few games. Getting down to brass tax, this laptop is packing an AMD Ryzen 5 7530U with Radeon Graphics, 8gb of RAM, and a 256gb SSD. The specs aren't too poultry, however it is by no means a gaming powerhouse either.

Next is the world that we will be using for this test. Ideally, the worlds would be exactly the same between the two editions, however I have noticed some differences that I just don't think we can avoid. Upon spawning into each world using the same exact seed, the biomes and overall landscape looked the same, but I very quickly noticed that generated structures were different. Villages and pillager outposts seemed to be generating independently of the world seed, and I imagine that the same holds true for the other generated structures in the world. There are probably other differences in the world generation magic that I am missing, and I don't think that we will be able to do anything about them. Nevertheless, I think it should have a negligible impact on performance.

Now for the actual test case. This part can be done in many different ways, like blowing up lots of TNT or building giant redstone contraptions. For me however, I think that the best way to do this is to just fly around a whole bunch. I say this because I think this will be a long sustained load that will put many components of the computer to the test like disk and memory, and I think that it will be a good simulation of long, drawn out play sessions where you have a big task you're trying to complete, and small but frequent stuttering will bug the crap out of you.

So lets get started then. I'm going to start at spawn (-63, 69, 0), and fly north for a few minutes until I reach the coordinates of -6, 80, -2854. I will be watching the framerate, and also making a mental note of how much stuttering I encounter. Render distance will be set to 32 chunks and graphical settings will be cranked to the max.

Doing this in Java edition was pretty striking. Starting off the journey, we were pretty solidly averaging 20 fps, but after a minute or two of flight we were down to ten. That's pretty unplayable, however I could get the fps up to 60 by tweaking just a few video settings, meaning that it was still easy to get an enjoyable experience.

Moving on to Bedrock edition, things were much more cut and dry. With all settings cranked to the max, and with render distance at 32 chunks, I got a solid 30 fps while flying around with some stutters here and there. If you walked around instead, the framerate increased to 60! Additionally, turning the render distance down to 16 chunks eliminated the performance woes, and the game ran as smooth as silk.

So in conclusion then, while Java edition is not horrible, you are definitely going to notice a squeeze on lower end hardware. It's for that reason I would recommend that most users should generally gravitate towards Bedrock, unless you have a specific reason not to, such as if you are gaming on a Mac, or if you intend to mod the game.

Lastly, I want to go over exactly why Java edition runs that much worse. Admittedly, what I am going to mention here is kinda conjecture, as I can't make too many concrete claims without knowing all the ins and outs of how Minecraft is written. That being said, lets go over what I think is causing Java edition to run slower.

In my opinion, the biggest reason why is that Java edition uses OpenGL, and the Bedrock edition for Windows uses DirectX. These are both Graphics APIs, which is the set of commands that the game can use to talk to the computers graphics processor, and thus render the game on your monitor. OpenGL has the major advantage of being cross platform but is also nowhere near as performant. DirectX only runs on Windows and the Xbox, but is widely regarded as the best. This kind of stuff might not be obvious at first, but can have a huge impact on the game you play, and can even make or break the experience in some cases.

The second reason that I think the game runs slower on Java edition is because of what the game is written in; Java. To go more in detail about this we need to learn a bit about how programming languages work. In short, to get our code to run we need to compile it; that is, translate the code into instructions that our processor can read. Bedrock edition is written in C++, which compiles directly into raw machine code that the processor reads directly. The downside is that this is not cross platform, since machine code only works on one type of processor, but it's about as fast as you can possibly get it. Java on the other hand compiles into bytecode, which has to be translated on the fly by the Java runtime environment on your computer. This middle man enables the code to be cross platform, but you will take a performance hit in the process.

Lastly, and likely least admittedly, is its age. I'll remind you that this is conjecture, but Java edition is pretty old. The oldest edition period. It is almost a decade older than Bedrock edition, and is still being updated to this day. I can't say for sure, but my guess is that there is at least some inefficient code weighing Java edition down, as that just happens with software sometimes. It just builds up as the software ages and new features get piled on, and suddenly the developers have a huge mess to clean up. Just take a gander at the Adobe suite.

In conclusion then, I hope you learned a thing or two about how Minecraft works under the hood, and why the performance of the game might just not be quite good enough on that gaming PC that is starting to age. Anyways, my hands are cramping and it's getting late, so peace out!

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