Tuesday, November 09, 2021

Fast and Pretty Minecraft Is Possible

There's something about Minecraft that makes it quite relaxing, especially in survival single player. Physics is a thing, one can play as normal as possible, and can switch over to something less onerous should the whim come on.

I spent time extending my nether rail to have a more direct route to the Blaze spawner. At the same time, I used the new location in the nether that I connected to to open a new overworld portal to somewhere unknown and unexplored. Those are fun.

What was truly fun was testing out Iris Shaders with Complementary Shaders for Minecraft release 1.17.1.

Originally, I ran in vanilla, but never got performance beyond a slightly better potato PC despite Eileen-II's specifications. It did not help that some changes to the rendering was done that led to a slow down.

Then I got Optifine---that improved the performance. Then I fell into the shaders rabbit-hole and ended up with Complementary Shaders after testing several others. It performed well unless the dynamic shadows was turned on, at which point the frame rate tanked---mind you, this is an NVIDIA RTX 2070 Super we are talking about here.

My workaround then was to turn off the dynamic shadows. It looked pretty, but had passable frame rates with some lag spike here and there.

I have heard of Iris Shaders and an associated alternative Minecraft rendering engine that was newer and ``better'' than Optifine called Sodium. I didn't try it till today.

My goodness. What a game changer.

Dynamic shadows was running in Complementary Shaders, and yet the performance was still acceptable at a render distance of 12 chunks (I've given up on using 16 chunks in general, Optifine or Iris Shaders).

Only catch was that the glass blocks did not link up seamlessly, but that is really quite minor.

Pretty world and better than vanilla performance, what's there to not like?

That's all for this entry. Till the next update.

No comments: