Hello, my name is MCBYT! I am a parkour player. I have a good PC now, but it wasn't always this way; until halfway through 2018, I was using a Windows Vista computer that was older than me! Since I'm a youtuber, I had to figure out some way to record and still get decent FPS. So I searched. For days, weeks, months; years, even! And finally, I have found the perfect setup for the best FPS. This section currently has a pinned FPS boost thread, but it’s been 4 years; I think it’s time for an update. I've organized the different methods by average performance boost, the highest boost being at the top and the lowest boost being at the bottom. Let's begin!
And that’s essentially it! If you know any other tricks, feel free to tell me; I may have missed some. Combining all these fixes together has done more than quadruple my FPS in some situations, and do even more in others! With just a GT 1030 (the lowest of the NVIDIA 10xx series of GPUs) and default motherboard/RAM/CPU (for the Optiplex 9020), I have been able to achieve an average FPS of 200-800, depending on the gamemode, and a maximum FPS of over 2,000! Hopefully, you will have as good of an improvement as me. Hopefully this helps you all out, and post your results in the replies, I’m curious to hear them. Bye!
The single most effective way of increasing FPS is to install Optifine. Optifine is a mod that improves FPS and adds more options for controlling your Minecraft settings. It can be installed into Forge, LiteLoader, or vanilla (modless) Minecraft. There are alternatives like Frames++ and BetterFPS, but I find that Optifine helps the most. If it benefits you, you can install multiple mods.
If you do not want to install an FPS mod, you can try a client with FPS boosts built in. There are numerous clients, such as BLC (Badlion Client), Cosmic Client, OCMC (Optic Craft Minecraft Client), and Lunar Client. All of these clients are known to boost FPS, and they also include many PvP/cosmetic mods, none of which are considered to be hacks. These clients shouldn’t get you banned practically anywhere, as they are widely accepted as legitimate. I would personally suggest Badlion Client, as Cosmic’s GUI isn’t particularly pleasing, OCMC is hard to find, and Lunar Client has a bit of a shady history. If you use Mac, however, Cosmic Client is definitely the client to go for. By default, this will slightly boost your FPS, but there are tutorials you can find to increase the FPS even more by optimizing the settings.
Minecraft’s settings can have a significant effect on your FPS. First off, always keep your FPS cap at either a high limit or at unlimited. Contrary to popular belief, you CAN notice a difference between high FPS and V-Sync FPS, even on a low HZ monitor. Thus, I suggest you set your FPS limit between 125 FPS (for 60, 85, and 120hz monitors) and 250 FPS (for 144hz, 180hz, and 240hz monitors). If you’d like, you can set your FPS to unlimited, but this tends to unnecessarily take up extra system resources. Another major setting is resolution. If you can bear to do so, turn your resolution down a notch or two, and see if your FPS improves. On some computers, it can be a tremendous help, at the loss of very little quality. Render distance should also be kept in mind, as higher levels result in more loaded objects, and therefore, more lag. For servers like Creative or Parkour, you shouldn’t need a render distance any higher than 2, and for the other servers, anywhere between 2 and 6 should suffice. There are many other settings that you can change to improve FPS, but they are rather minor. I’ve linked a useful tutorial below, in case you’d like to make your settings essentially perfect.
Minecraft’s text renderer is extremely inefficient, and as a result, anything that shows text on screen (especially with shadows) causes a severe loss in FPS. There are several ways to remedy this, though. First off, I suggest you download powns’ Sidebar Mod. This hides the sidebar on the right side that shows your mana, jumps, and more. This can improve your FPS immensely, I’ve heard stories of this improving FPS by as high as 300%! It’s also very helpful to either completely hide or to shrink chat (there is a helpful mod called “CompactChat” by Sk1er that you should download; it combines duplicate messages to prevent chat spam and lag caused by it). If you absolutely must have chat or sidebars, I suggest removing the shadows, as they are basically a duplicate of the text. You can control the sidebar shadows in Sidebar Mod and the chat shadows in your default Minecraft chat settings. However, this fix is more effective on older computers; newer computers will still see an improvement, but not by nearly as much.
F1 has a similar effect to the text/FOV methods, but on a much more extreme level. Not only will it hide chat and sidebars, but also the rest of your GUI entirely, including your hand, hotbar, held items, mod overlays, crosshair, and more. This isn’t ideal for PvP, as your crosshair (used to aim) will be completely invisible. However, for things like grinding mobs on Skyblock or Factions, simple jumps on Parkour, or anything else like that, this is extremely helpful; for me, this can give me up to double my normal FPS!
Increasing FOV provides a minor boost in FPS, depending on how much it is increased. If you’re able to bear it without getting nauseated, I suggest you turn your FOV as low as 60 (anywhere lower, and generally it isn’t very enjoyable). The reason this works is that, as your FOV increases, the amount of polygons (shapes) in your field of view also increases. More polygons means more work by your GPU, so by lowering the FOV and therefore the polygons in view, you can improve FPS, although usually only by 5-20% (depending on the intensity of your change).
Before you even press play on the Minecraft client, you can potentially increase FPS by allocating more RAM, or memory, to the game. You can do this by clicking on launch options, then choosing your current profile (displayed on the play screen). Then click the JVM Arguments switch, and type -Xmx#G. (If you do not see the JVM Arguments option, you may need to turn on advanced settings before opening your profile). Replace # with the amount of gigabytes of ram you’d like Minecraft to have; generally, you want to dedicate around half of your computers RAM to Minecraft, and more if you have a PC with over 8 GB of RAM.
Not only are your Minecraft settings important, but also, your computer settings! There is a lot that you can do to optimize your CPU, graphics card, and more. I suggest following the tutorial I’ve linked below; I used it on my PC, and it has given me an FPS boost of 5-25% on ALL games, at the loss of just a few window transitions and details. Of course, you don’t have to follow every part of the tutorial to see an improvement, so if you insist on keeping your desktop background, animations, etc, you can always skip that part. Overclocking your GPU or CPU is also a definite option, which essentially makes them run faster than intended. However, I encourage anyone doing this to do so with EXTREME caution, and only in very small increments. If you are underage, I recommend you to ask an adult to assist and oversee you whilst doing it. Even a small mistake can result in an unusable computer. Overclock as a LAST RESORT, or on an old PC that you don’t need.
Closing background apps frees up RAM, CPU, and GPU space for Minecraft to run on. Close any unnecessary background apps, such as an idle browser window/tab, an unused Discord/Teamspeak/Skype instance, etc. You can also increase Minecraft’s resource priority above other applications through Task Manager. First, open task manager. Then, go to the details tab. Search for “javaw.exe”. Right click, hover over “priority”, and put this at High or Above Normal. Realtime often causes computer lag, but for powerful PCs, this may work for you. If this trick causes your in-game sensitivity to glitch out, you will need to change back to normal or below normal priority to remedy it. It’s an unfortunate side effect of older versions of Optifine.
If you use several mods on your Minecraft profile, they can often add up and cause reduced FPS. I encourage you to go through your folder and delete any unused or unwanted mods; even simple mods like chat macros can reduce FPS.
Some Minecraft texture packs can increase your FPS, as well. Generally, any pack with a resolution lower than your current pack will provide an increase, although these are generally microscopic unless you use a pack as low as 4x4. In my pack, personally, I have changed a few “solid color” blocks to a 1x1 texture, both for smoothness and for FPS increase. Stone, diorite, andesite, granite, quartz, obsidian, and stained clay are all great blocks to change, as they don’t generally look very poor when turned into 1x1 (if done correctly).
And that’s essentially it! If you know any other tricks, feel free to tell me; I may have missed some. Combining all these fixes together has done more than quadruple my FPS in some situations, and do even more in others! With just a GT 1030 (the lowest of the NVIDIA 10xx series of GPUs) and default motherboard/RAM/CPU (for the Optiplex 9020), I have been able to achieve an average FPS of 200-800, depending on the gamemode, and a maximum FPS of over 2,000! Hopefully, you will have as good of an improvement as me. Hopefully this helps you all out, and post your results in the replies, I’m curious to hear them. Bye!
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