A few things I have noticed about modded mc from a hardware standpoint

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Wagon153

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Jul 29, 2019
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Render distance typically at far, but dropping it doesn't typically have enough of a gain for it to be worth it for me. This has been a long-standing issue for me (even pre-1.7, though I can't say if it was to the same extent), but more recently I've seen it with both Infinity and TPPI2. I love playing modded packs and frequently muddle through, but late game gets hard to enjoy for me with the lag that starts creeping in.
How much RAM do you dedicate? Too little and it'll be doing a lot of garbage collection, causing constant FPS drops. Too much and each garbage collection will cause massive drops. Also, try setting the Minecraft client to use a different core using task manager.
 

Middleclaw

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Apr 12, 2014
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Is there really that big of difference between the FX 8320 and FX 6350?

I run:
FX 6350 (Clocked to 3.9Ghz)
16 GB RAM
256 SSD
AMD R9 280x GPU

And I struggle for 40fps at times. That's on the Infinity btw
40FPS is really bad for those kind of specs. I'm stable at 60 FPS with soartex because I set my FPS limit at 60. As for optimizations. i am not using any. Just running with the default settings using Java 8_u45 with 4GB RAM allocated.

No not really. However, those screenshots were with no machines or bases in the background/foreground. If you are struggling to reach 40 FPS, you need to do some lag busting in you base.

Below is the screenshot encompassing my entire base using the test settings mentioned previously. Yes, it's all underground and no machines yet as it is still a new world being only a couple of days old.

Strange that the F3 debug screen drops my FPS by about 25%

2015-06-04_18.44.36.png
 

snaiperskaya

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Jul 29, 2019
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How much RAM do you dedicate? Too little and it'll be doing a lot of garbage collection, causing constant FPS drops. Too much and each garbage collection will cause massive drops. Also, try setting the Minecraft client to use a different core using task manager.

I usually do around 4Gb of RAM, but I've tried more and less. I just did a bit of toying around with TPPI2 and found no change between Fast/Fancy graphics, Smooth lighting on/off, Render Distance from 10 to 5 chunks and even between fullscreen and the default windowed size (which should hopefully rule out issues with my 1440p resolution being too much). And this is all with FPS unlimited and vsync off, as well as mipmaps off (which did seem to help. apparently that's an AMD gpu thing).

GPU might spike as high as 80-ish% (1 GPU), but typically stays under 20-30% usage and CPU usage is ~1 core's worth. I feel like it should be taking advantage of more, but I've not had any luck in getting it to do so.

Just so you can see I'm not lying or maybe I'm missing something in this:

c9ef9ab4bd.jpg


When I took that screenshot, in game I was in my underground base with only ~30fps. I'm not looking for miracles, I just feel like I should be doing far better than this overall.

**EDIT** another thing to note in that is that the GPU clock never really ramps up. I've tried a ton of different things for that without luck as well. So, even the 80% usage spikes are only at ~40% of the GPU clock, making the overall usage even lower.
 

Wagon153

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Jul 29, 2019
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I usually do around 4Gb of RAM, but I've tried more and less. I just did a bit of toying around with TPPI2 and found no change between Fast/Fancy graphics, Smooth lighting on/off, Render Distance from 10 to 5 chunks and even between fullscreen and the default windowed size (which should hopefully rule out issues with my 1440p resolution being too much). And this is all with FPS unlimited and vsync off, as well as mipmaps off (which did seem to help. apparently that's an AMD gpu thing).

GPU might spike as high as 80-ish% (1 GPU), but typically stays under 20-30% usage and CPU usage is ~1 core's worth. I feel like it should be taking advantage of more, but I've not had any luck in getting it to do so.

Just so you can see I'm not lying or maybe I'm missing something in this:

c9ef9ab4bd.jpg


When I took that screenshot, in game I was in my underground base with only ~30fps. I'm not looking for miracles, I just feel like I should be doing far better than this overall.

**EDIT** another thing to note in that is that the GPU clock never really ramps up. I've tried a ton of different things for that without luck as well. So, even the 80% usage spikes are only at ~40% of the GPU clock, making the overall usage even lower.
This all points toward a CPU bottleneck, which should not be happening at all... Does cranking up your clockspeed help at all? Also, does setting the cpu affinity for Minecraft to your third or fourth core help?
 

snaiperskaya

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Jul 29, 2019
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This all points toward a CPU bottleneck, which should not be happening at all... Does cranking up your clockspeed help at all? Also, does setting the cpu affinity for Minecraft to your third or fourth core help?

Changing the affinity between any combination of other cores doesn't appear to have any effect at all and the clock I have of 4.3GHz is already an overclock from the stock 3.5GHz, but I didn't notice much of a change in MC when I made that change a while back. I also tried upping the process priority (to High or even Realtime), but that didn't seem to have an effect either.

This is all kind of why I'm stumped. This is all with fastcraft installed too, otherwise it would be completely unplayable. Now, I can go to undeveloped parts of the map and get 70-80fps, so I'm not saying that what I've setup isn't contributing, but this is a consistent issue with these packs. There are other people on my server whose bases I can't even really visit without playing Slideshow Hero or even timing out. And for reference as well, the server is hosted on another dedicated machine with a Gbit network connection and it's running, even now with 20TPS and a 25ms tick time, which I think is pretty good for multiple people chunk loading and running end-game machines and setups. Even with 3-4 people online at once, unless people are exploring heavily, we typically stay under 35ms and 20TPS, so I don't suspect any issues on that side.

**EDIT** Just so it's clear, I'm not necessarily expecting a solution here, I was just hoping to get some second opinions. I realized how some of this could be interpreted and I'm not asking people to solve all my problems for me. Even I lack the licensing to provide that kind of help... :<
 

Wagon153

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Jul 29, 2019
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Changing the affinity between any combination of other cores doesn't appear to have any effect at all and the clock I have of 4.3GHz is already an overclock from the stock 3.5GHz, but I didn't notice much of a change in MC when I made that change a while back. I also tried upping the process priority (to High or even Realtime), but that didn't seem to have an effect either.

This is all kind of why I'm stumped. This is all with fastcraft installed too, otherwise it would be completely unplayable. Now, I can go to undeveloped parts of the map and get 70-80fps, so I'm not saying that what I've setup isn't contributing, but this is a consistent issue with these packs. There are other people on my server whose bases I can't even really visit without playing Slideshow Hero or even timing out. And for reference as well, the server is hosted on another dedicated machine with a Gbit network connection and it's running, even now with 20TPS and a 25ms tick time, which I think is pretty good for multiple people chunk loading and running end-game machines and setups. Even with 3-4 people online at once, unless people are exploring heavily, we typically stay under 35ms and 20TPS, so I don't suspect any issues on that side.
Hmm. Does your cpu maintain it's clocks while playing? I've seen several instances on /r/buildapc where people were having issues with FPS, and it turned out that the cpu was downclocking itself for no reason.
 

snaiperskaya

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Jul 29, 2019
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Hmm. Does your cpu maintain it's clocks while playing? I've seen several instances on /r/buildapc where people were having issues with FPS, and it turned out that the cpu was downclocking itself for no reason.

Yep, everything I have is reading between 4.25GHz and 4.3GHz and both GPU and CPU are running quite cool, so it shouldn't be a question of thermal throttling or anything either.
 

Wagon153

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Jul 29, 2019
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Yep, everything I have is reading between 4.25GHz and 4.3GHz and both GPU and CPU are running quite cool, so it shouldn't be a question of thermal throttling or anything either.
I can only think of one last thing to try. Try installing a distro of linux (such as ubuntu or linux mint) on a small partition. Install the AMD open source drivers and Java 8, then copy over your save file and mc files(windows partition is fully accessible from within linux). If your FPS in linux gets a giant boost, a reinstall of Windows may be in your future.
 

snaiperskaya

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Jul 29, 2019
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I can only think of one last thing to try. Try installing a distro of linux (such as ubuntu or linux mint) on a small partition. Install the AMD open source drivers and Java 8, then copy over your save file and mc files(windows partition is fully accessible from within linux). If your FPS in linux gets a giant boost, a reinstall of Windows may be in your future.

Yeah, probably not a bad thought and I may have to try it. Last I checked, win 8 is not a fan of dual booting, so I may need to find an extra drive to toss in to boot to.
 

lenscas

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Yeah, probably not a bad thought and I may have to try it. Last I checked, win 8 is not a fan of dual booting, so I may need to find an extra drive to toss in to boot to.
If you go for dual booting, make sure that fastboot is disabled, I believe you can change it under the energy options.
 

Hambeau

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Jul 24, 2013
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Yeah, probably not a bad thought and I may have to try it. Last I checked, win 8 is not a fan of dual booting, so I may need to find an extra drive to toss in to boot to.

I've not tried any Linux distros, but Win 8.1 dual-boots fine with Win10 Tech. Preview. While this may not mean much, I find that Modded MC seems a bit smoother running on my Win10 partition, although I don't have hard numbers. This may be due to a "stale" Win8 installation.

I'm running the Curse Voice client and letting the Mojang launcher run the Java 8 runtime, with Infinity, Direwolf20 and AgSkies 2 packs as well as a custom Vanilla profile using the current MC (1.8.6).
 

lenscas

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I've not tried any Linux distros, but Win 8.1 dual-boots fine with Win10 Tech. Preview. While this may not mean much, I find that Modded MC seems a bit smoother running on my Win10 partition, although I don't have hard numbers. This may be due to a "stale" Win8 installation.

I'm running the Curse Voice client and letting the Mojang launcher run the Java 8 runtime, with Infinity, Direwolf20 and AgSkies 2 packs as well as a custom Vanilla profile using the current MC (1.8.6).

I currently use a double boot on my laptop(tripple boot even) and if you don't disable fast boot bad stuff can and probably will happen.
 

Excaerious

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Jul 29, 2019
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Thought I'd contribute a bit, in general at least. I run a similar setup to a few people here (6350 @ 4.0 ghz, 16GB ram (3.5 allocated), 280x), and find the game... unplayable without Optifine. I get that same unusual nearly 40 FPS running a modded pack , which - for me at least, is pretty unacceptable. The second I throw in Optifine (especially the U edition which allows for Multicore support), I can get all the way up to those 200 / 300 numbers, though not nearly stable enough to warrant the jet engine noise so I just cap it at 70-80. Fastcraft can add a bit to that as well, mostly stabilizing the frames. As for other sources of lag, my Win7 installation is probably quite 'stale' by now but I've got no other issues with anything else. Also, I'm running MC and my OS off an SSD, not that it means anything.

Things like fastmath and fastrender (this moreso, for somewhat obvious reasons), actually decrease my FPS.

Mipmap levels seem to have an usually large impact on my FPS.

Dropping my view distance down can dramatically increase my FPS. I play on '8'.
 

ChemE

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Jul 29, 2019
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It seems like I am getting pretty snappy frame rates on infinity 1.5.1 compared to a lot of other hardware setups so let me detail what I'm using in case anyone else wants to duplicate it. I used a shoestring budget because well I don't like spending a lot of money on something that will be a boat anchor in two years.

Here is my full system build:
http://pcpartpicker.com/p/BYnmBm

The price all in today is $480 (I added back the price of the SSD which apparently is already totally off the market for the 850) but I got it all for $370 by timing my purchases carefully. Also, pretty unusually, I am running Lubuntu 14.04 LTS as my OS because I hate Window's bloat and cost. When I boot to the desktop my RAM usage is sitting at 268MB. I'm not saying this is the world's best machine but it cost <$400 and does 400 fps in infinity using @Wagon153 's test settings and only uses 45 watts while doing it. Hope that helps someone else!
 

Wagon153

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Jul 29, 2019
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Thought I'd contribute a bit, in general at least. I run a similar setup to a few people here (6350 @ 4.0 ghz, 16GB ram (3.5 allocated), 280x), and find the game... unplayable without Optifine. I get that same unusual nearly 40 FPS running a modded pack , which - for me at least, is pretty unacceptable. The second I throw in Optifine (especially the U edition which allows for Multicore support), I can get all the way up to those 200 / 300 numbers, though not nearly stable enough to warrant the jet engine noise so I just cap it at 70-80. Fastcraft can add a bit to that as well, mostly stabilizing the frames. As for other sources of lag, my Win7 installation is probably quite 'stale' by now but I've got no other issues with anything else. Also, I'm running MC and my OS off an SSD, not that it means anything.

Things like fastmath and fastrender (this moreso, for somewhat obvious reasons), actually decrease my FPS.

Mipmap levels seem to have an usually large impact on my FPS.

Dropping my view distance down can dramatically increase my FPS. I play on '8'.
I'm guessing that giant increase in FPS comes from the multicore rendering optifine can do, which makes a lot of sense. That is Piledriver's specialty after all. As for mipmapping, a lot of people with AMD cards are reporting the same. Perhaps I should see what difference it makes on my r9 270 and hd 5450.
 

DZCreeper

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Jul 29, 2019
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It seems like I am getting pretty snappy frame rates on infinity 1.5.1 compared to a lot of other hardware setups so let me detail what I'm using in case anyone else wants to duplicate it. I used a shoestring budget because well I don't like spending a lot of money on something that will be a boat anchor in two years.

Here is my full system build:
http://pcpartpicker.com/p/BYnmBm

The price all in today is $480 (I added back the price of the SSD which apparently is already totally off the market for the 850) but I got it all for $370 by timing my purchases carefully. Also, pretty unusually, I am running Lubuntu 14.04 LTS as my OS because I hate Window's bloat and cost. When I boot to the desktop my RAM usage is sitting at 268MB. I'm not saying this is the world's best machine but it cost <$400 and does 400 fps in infinity using @Wagon153 's test settings and only uses 45 watts while doing it. Hope that helps someone else!

Good choices but new builders can do slightly better for the money.

PCPartPicker part list / Price breakdown by merchant

CPU: Intel Pentium G3258 3.2GHz Dual-Core Processor ($64.95 @ NCIX US)
Motherboard: MSI H81M-P33 Micro ATX LGA1150 Motherboard ($43.98 @ Newegg)
Memory: G.Skill Sniper 8GB (2 x 4GB) DDR3-1600 Memory ($59.99 @ Newegg)
Storage: Samsung 850 EVO-Series 120GB 2.5&quot; Solid State Drive ($67.98 @ OutletPC)
Video Card: Sapphire Radeon R9 270X 2GB Dual-X Video Card ($144.99 @ Newegg)
Case: Corsair SPEC-01 RED ATX Mid Tower Case ($47.99 @ Micro Center)
Power Supply: Corsair Builder 600W 80+ Bronze Certified ATX Power Supply ($56.99 @ Amazon)
Total: $486.87
Prices include shipping, taxes, and discounts when available
Generated by PCPartPicker 2015-06-04 17:37 EDT-0400


For a whole 7 dollars more you get the same processor but with overclocking, a slightly faster SSD, a significantly better video card, and more accommodating case+power supply for future upgrades.

One of my secondary machines has almost these exact parts and averages 160FPS in a mid-late game Infinity base and because I got curious I found it can peak over 1000 on flat worlds with Optifine+FastCraft and low render distance. At that point its actually the Minecraft engine hitting its limits. My main machine also has a G3258 but has a much larger overclock, its a great chip.