GTX 970 cant run minecraft at large render distances?

Page 2 - Seeking answers? Join the Tom's Hardware community: where nearly two million members share solutions and discuss the latest tech.

jasonhickman17

Distinguished
May 15, 2013
197
0
18,690
So i just tried playing minecraft, i usually play first person shooters which run fine but as soon as i started trying to increase the render distance on minecraft my computer couldnt keep up.

Current build is here:
Intel i5-6400
Gskill Ripjaws 16GB DDR4 2400MHZ
GTX 970 SC ACX 2.0
EVGA 750W Supernova
Gigabyte Z170 DH3P
Seagate Barracuda 2TB 7200 RPM HDD
ADATA Premier 240GB 6GB/s SSD
5 Deepcool TF120 Red's
Corsair H110I GTX
Corsair 780T Case
Optical Drive

Any suggestions on what the issue may be?
 
Solution


okay give me a minute.

i should add that it never used to run at those temps, but i only check the temps with one monitor.
 


Okay so i disconnected the one monitor, ran the fans at 100% and then set the fan profile to EVGA's percision X setting for quiet and it seems to be running at 30ish degrees for now. So maybe it is because i have two monitors connected, one of the monitors are running DVI and that is the one that i disconnected so maybe that was an issue? It doesnt have DVI so i cannot run it through HDMI. I just updated the NVIDIA drivers as well.

The fans are set by default not to run and my GPU reached 65C with just one monitor, maybe i will make a new thread about this issue alone then get back to minecraft in this thread
 
Gtx660ti with i5 3570k and I get over 300fps with vanilla minecraft. On my gtx970 with I7 3770k I get closer to 500fps. I'd say there is more going on than what's visible. Motherboard drivers, lan drivers, even running the optimization software for the ssd. My Samsung 840pro was getting 200+ r/w until I ran the magician software with rapid r/w and now it's getting over 500 r/w and it's made a difference. Also moved the Sata from the marvel Sata connection to the Intel Sata ports made a word of difference. It may end up being a combination of several factors resulting in your slowdowns, not necessarily just the Java.
 


Okay so i will give these things a shot, not sure where i can find out if the sata ports are intel or not but all i did was plugged the SSD into sata port 0 and the HDD into sata port 1. Thanks for the input i wouldnt mind squeezing more performance out of my computer for free 😉

 


thats true your build should clear 500fps with no issue
i honestly think you should reinstall all the drivers and if that does not work go to your last resort and reinstal windows
 
Solution



DONT SAY THAT 😛 I am working on installing all motherboard drivers right now then onto GPU and chipsets and then hope and pray that it works.
 


ok :) fingers crossed :)
 


now the computer will not shut down without me holding the power button for a complete shutdown after downloading all of the drivers and ADATA's SSD optimization software...

Minecraft runs a bit better now with the lag spikes more spaced out and more severe.

this is gonna take a while LOL

I was able to uninstall a lot of the new software without any issues and the computers booting is fixed back into the game fix,

Oh and i made a fan curve that keeps the GPU at 35C relatively silently
 
Soooooo, after reinstalling all of the drivers, uninstalling all extra nvidia geforce programs, minecraft was able to work without any lag spikes, except for the odd one that drops the framerate to zero which only happens every thousand steps or so in one direction at a render distance of 18 and all animations off. Thanks so much for your help and all of the time that you put into this thread and helping me play minecraft! Oh and thanks for making that fix not be reinstalling windows lol!
 
I am assuming you are playing 1.9.2?

Here is some things to do. On the launcher edit your profile and enable the JVM arguments checkbox, but don't change anything in it.

That will enable the Java trash collection to be run concurrently instead of stopping the game to GC. This was a huge issue for me and sounds like you are suffering from it too. If you want, you can change this:

-Xmx1G

to

-Xmx2G

I don't recommend setting that higher than 4. That sets the max RAM for the game. Really the default is fine.

Now ingame, make sure to set "Use VBOs" to true. Set "Max Framerate" to "Unlimited" (slider all the way to the right). Make sure "Use Vsync" is "Off". Setting "Smooth Lighting" to "Minimum" also makes a notable difference but has no visual impact vs "Maximum".

I do not recommend using a "Render Distance" higher than 24 chunks. If you recall when they added the option to set it that high, 32 chunks bugged out.

These changes should get you to about 100 - 250 FPS depending on the area and get rid of the framedrops from the garbage collector working in the background. Looking around at eye level I get the mentioned FPS (100-200). Looking straight down it peaks at around 750.

This is on a 144hz 1440p gsync monitor though, so I usually have gsync on and still it does drop from 144 FPS to 100 or so in some spots. This is all while using the "Faithful" texture pack.

If you already have forge installed, there is also a mod called "Fastcraft" that works wonders for modded minecraft but can break certain mods. It is worth it though, really helps modded MC out a lot.

ed: sorry for the late post, I was testing these suggestions to make sure they were accurate. I play vanilla MC all the time with my PC. I use a 4790k + 970 😛. Nothing wrong with some good old fashioned Minecraft!
 


I will give that a shot when i increased the ram i increase both X increments to 10G, i have 16GB of ram installed, i will go and try those ingame sollutions now. I also, in game after i think that the issue was fixed ran at 100% and got roughly the same frames as you are talking about so i think that the problem may be remedied except for the odd lag spike far inbetween.


That helped a lot as well and with unlimited frame rate i am getting spikes or 1040FPS!!! usually running around 200FPS though but i am still getting the odd far between lag spike where the frame rates drop to zero and immediately return. Also my gpu has terrible coil whine at 200-1000FPS
 


well the problem is back and is more severe now than it ever was which i really annoying, the frame rate drops all the way down to zero at times, this time i have HWmonitor open to make sure everything is in check and the CPU spikes at 83% usage so i am not sure if that could be an issue i only imagine it would be an issue if it was spiking all the way up at 100% but it wasnt, all of my temps were good i had both the CPU and the GPU staying under 40, the CPU was at 30C and the GPU was at average of 40C. So i am all out of options i am going to go back into the BIOS and see what i can find and if i cant find what i need i am going to have to uninstall and update windows, which will be a bad bad bad day LOL
 


try turning off vbos fast render fast math and lazy chunk loading
also try fiddling with antialising and anisotrofic filtering
also is there a setting that says loading and single and multicore? because multi core cpu setting off may be your issue
 


recomended is 4gb but im not sure thats a issue i have it run fine on 30gb
of my ram

btw i did it for fun just to see how it worked :)
 


What do you have a full motherboard of 8GB sticks?!

As for the VBOS and the other settings that you recommend i change i have changed most of them except for checking the single core vs multi core setting, is that setting not in the NVIDIA software? I am currently in the process of extracting a windows file onto a USB and it is taking forever (probably would have been faster to flash the BIOS to the overclocking BIOS for non-K CPUS, overclocked my i5-6400, extracted the file, flashed the BIOS back to normal and then installed windows lol it has taken 35 minutes elapsed so far). I am glad that you got back to me now as i was just about to completely wipe my SSD and update windows, which if after this file is done transferring and your idea doesnt work i will have to carry out, i guess it is a good thing that i learned how to make a bootable USB drive anyways as it is pretty useful. It is pretty cool seeing 1000FPS displayed on the screen, although completely useless it is nice to know lol.
 


I did enable the JVM arguments but there are a lot of them in my list and i saw in a video on youtube that one guy recommended that i clear all of the ones there then type in what ram settings i would like the game to play at. Another thing that i wanted to ask am i going to be setting the ram to the same amount for the Xmx and Xms or am i to set different ram amounts?

 
First thing you need to do is go into the Optifine settings and restore the default video settings. Your game must look absolutely horrid with those settings you posted.



This is for vanilla. You want smooth lighting on, but set to "minimum"



here is the default JVM argument string:

-Xmx1G -XX:+UseConcMarkSweepGC -XX:+CMSIncrementalMode -XX:-UseAdaptiveSizePolicy -Xmn128M

copy that and paste it back into the box and don't delete or change anything without understanding what they do. Setting -Xmx to 15GB is completely pointless, all that will do is allocate 30GB of RAM to Minecraft (this is how Java memory allocation works, you can't see this ingame, need to use a profiler). The freezes are from the Java garbage collection.
 


yes :) i full 4 8gb sticks (for a modded minecraft server)
and for single core what optifine version are you using because it should be there on my 970 i got it
 



So after doing everything that you are saying, i am able to get the game to run well with the odd jitter (it is not a frame drop but a small jitter) when i am flying in creative and the render distance is at 20. Thank you for all of your help, it is greatly appreciated. One last question though what is the garbage collection, is that the VBO setting?

I have not tested all of the game areas for porblems yet so so far it is looking awesome, Thanks again!

Jason H

UPDATE: Finally after about five or six minutes of testing settings with the stock amount of ram that you said to allocate, i didnt need to copy and past theline of code that you game as i listened to your first post where it said not to change anything so i just reduced the amount of ram and there was no change in performance, thank you for your help it is awesome to be able to play the game at the settings that my rig should be capable of!
 


I didnt find the core option in optifine however i did find the core option in the nvidia control panel which once i turned on the game seemed to run a lot better, the load on the CPU however has increase to peaking around 80% which is a lot more than it was, the temps max out around 30C with the H110I GTX though :)

I am using the newest version of optifine and the newest minecraft version.
 


by jitter are the chunks flickering?