Why does minecraft lag?

[Joeytyndale]

Hey Everyone,

 

I have a Lenovo G560 with an Intel core 2 duo 2.0 GHz and 4 gigs of ram. It's old but it does what I need. What I'm wondering is why I can play Modern Warfare 2 with less lag then Minecraft. This confuses me. Is it that Java is an inefficient coding language for games? Or is it that the developers haven't optimized it well? It bothers me that such a simple game is unplayable on my system.

[Crabtr]

Minecraft runs funky even on higher-end computers, it's just because of how the game's built. From my understanding Java's only partially to blame, the lag's mostly an affect of the game constantly rendering and being RAM speed intensive. They've sorta remedied the situation by adding in OpenGL rendering, but it honestly doesn't help that much. Aside from playing in all low settings there's some various mods you can get like Optifine which apparently help some.

[Lyons]

Short answer:

Java

 

It's much better now than it used to be, though.

[joelthezombie15]

minecraft is unlike other games most games have a premade world that the computer already has thought up. minecraft however randomly creates the world as you play so the larger the world the more the computer has to randomly generate things. also everything in minecraft is changeable there is no set thing that can not be altered. where as in a game like cod there are walls and fake places and building that is just a shell so it is just loading essentially a picture. in minecraft it has to check every "tick" to see what has changed and if nothing has changed to keep it in place so you could say everything in minecraft is real and random. and other games are well games. hope that made sense and it helped.

[joelthezombie15]

also java is very little to blame IMO

[Joeytyndale]

Thanks guys, It makes more sense now. Still disappointing but at least I know what's up.

[Guest]

It would not surprise me if the code behind it all was a mess. Think about it, you've got a game that's been constantly added onto for the last 4 years, each time adding more and more into it. If you do that with any system, physical or synthetic - you'll end up with inefficiencies. 

[XiaoPigs]

Minecraft used to be a joke :( People would say can your PC run minecraft hur hur hur. I think having to code all the new stuff into the game caused some major issues with how the game renders internally. Hopefully when they actually stop adding stuff for awhile that they'll at least work on the game engine itself.

[Nit3Rid3R]

Notch should like, stop using Java and use a proper game engine, that way you can mod the crap out of it and it won't be lagging. (providing they keep the graphics as it is) 

[criso8]

It runs bad because updates not only add new features but add new functionality. When this happens code has to be changed in a ton of places and with constant updates it leads to inefficiencies. And think about it, minecraft was truly unique when it came out. Fps's have been around now for many years and they must share the basic structure that has been perfected over the years. Minecraft does not have that advantage.

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[Slotter]

I had the same problem a few years ago. I had 8gb of ram and it was lagging like crazy. I followed a guide similar to this and had no problems after the fact. http://www.wikihow.com/Make-Minecraft-Run-Faster-With-32-Bit-Java

[z I]

It just eats up PC's and spits them out, In all honesty as others have said it's Java that causes some of the issues and the fact the game is completely random on generating worlds and is constantly changing doesn't help either. 

[RuecanOnRails]

The problem does not from java. Java is a solid language, however the user is required to configure java outside of the game prior to launching to get better performance. The game code could be cleaned up a little for better performance but it's not poorly written.

 

Minecraft can load more data than most games. While it's not graphically intense (vanilla) it is very heavy on CPU, Ram, and hdd reads/writes. When you are loaded into the game, every single block is loaded.

 

There are 65,536 blocks per chunk. 441 chunks are loaded with the default view distance 28,901,376 blocks that the game loads in memory and calculates for spawning, movement, water, updates, etc. Every time you walk 16 blocks, a row of chunks behind you gets unloaded, and a new row infront gets loaded constantly stressing your HDD.

 

Some of the best ways to get more performance out of minecraft. Use 64 bit java, make sure you allocate additional ram to minecraft prior to launching, use a mod such as optifine to indepth tweak visuals, upgrade to an SSD or better yet use Ramdisk if you have enough ram. And of course check the minecraft forums performance thread for details and additional configs

[Sekonda]

Using a good launcher like SKCrafts one also improves performance for my high-end machine. It lets me allocate way more ram and configure a load of game stuff like resolution before I even launch it. 

[prodigydoo]

try going to C:\Users\[user]\AppData\Roaming\.minecraft

 

You probably want to backup your saves, texture packs and stats..  

 

Delete everything in there

 

Run minecraft.exe and allow it to update

 

Go back into that file and overwrite it with you backups if you made any

 

 

See if it fixed the problem..

 

 

 

Other than that, Make sure your on the correct version of java..  Minecraft has allot of problems if you dont have the exact right version.. although its usually crashes not lag

[Lemonsquare]

Decreasing your draw distance from what I remember can help a lot.

[Xin]

Modern Warfare 2 can be played just fine on an old Pentium 4 system. There's no surprise that you find MW2 having less lag compared to Minecraft that uses a lot more of your laptop's resources.

 

Short answer: Laptop + Java is still broken.

[Tigerbomb8]

one thing i have noticed is minecraft runs alot smoother if you run a local server then connect to it