Relatively low fps in minecraft?

[anon1239]

Hi, i was wondering why (with all possible minimal settings) i can sometimes get 1300 fps in a flat world in minecraft and sometimes 2500 fps. Sometimes i only get 500, surprisingly. I have an i7 4960x and one of evga's gtx 780 ti sc with acx cooling. Ive heard some people get above 4000 or even 5000 so could someone please explain why people with worse specs can get much higher fps? This computer is pretty new just made about a week ago. I've heard you can to increase the performance via Nvidia control panel, but I am not certain which settings need to be tweaked.


Thanks and feel free to post your fps down below with specs.

 

[XtremeAero426]

Hi, i was wondering why (with all possible minimal settings) i can sometimes get 1300 fps in a flat world in minecraft and sometimes 2500 fps. Sometimes i only get 500, surprisingly. I have an i7 4960x and one of evga's gtx 780 ti sc with acx cooling. Ive heard some people get above 4000 or even 5000 so could someone please explain why people with worse specs can get much higher fps? This computer is pretty new just made about a week ago. I've heard you can to increase the performance via Nvidia control panel, but I am not certain which settings need to be tweaked.


Thanks and feel free to post your fps down below with specs.

Um... Any FPS over 200 is fine and you will never need anymore than that (unless you want to see slow-motion). You shouldn't worry about FPS unless you drop below 60.

 

[Rationale]

Some people don't change the chunks above 8 when they test their framerates. The hit is larger than one would expect; 16 chunks is not actually double the amount to render as 8 chunks, but actually 4x as much as 8 chunks since it's a radius. I wouldn't be surprised to find that the people getting 3000+ fps were running the default 8 chunks, or older versions of the game without as many graphical effects.

Obviously that high of a framerate is ridiculously pointless anyway, but I assume you're just asking to find out if there's anything wrong.

 

[anon1239]

Yep, thanks for the feedback! I'll test out a few things and hopefully I should see some "results".

 

[anon1239]

Hmm, I tried going back to an earlier version on Minecraft and still received around 1600 fps. Is it possible to increase it from there or is there nothing else to be done?

 

[Rationale]

Well, what kind of rigs get 2500+ fps? You have the best i7 for rendering and multithreading, but Minecraft only uses 1 CPU core, and core-per-core there are some i7s faster.

http://cpuboss.com/cpus/Intel-Core-i7-4960X-vs-Intel-4790K

I doubt there's anything wrong with your setup, but if you want the bragging rights of 2500+ fps you might try the Opftifine mod for Minecraft; it can allow Minecraft to use more than 1 CPU core in many cases, though from what I hear it requires some tweaking.

Additionally, you should have the 64-bit version of Java installed.

 

[anon1239]

Yea I tried using optifine and my cpu is i7 4960x and gpu is gtx 780 ti sc with acx cooling. Still can't reach the level tho :\.

 

[Rationale]

Yea I tried using optifine and my cpu is i7 4960x and gpu is gtx 780 ti sc with acx cooling. Still can't reach the level tho :\.

As mentioned, the are are few i7s faster than yours when running just on a single core. Can't be sure that's the problem, but it's a possibility.

 

[anon1239]

doesn't the 4960x have the best single core performance and passmark score for an i7 as shown here: http://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu.php?cpu=Intel+Core+i7-4960X+%40+3.60GHz&id=2026 and here http://cpuboss.com/cpu/Intel-Core-i7-4960X?

 

[Rationale]

doesn't the 4960x have the best single core performance and passmark score for an i7 as shown here: http://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu.php?cpu=Intel+Core+i7-4960X+%40+3.60GHz&id=2026 and here http://cpuboss.com/cpu/Intel-Core-i7-4960X?

Passmark tests all cores, not just one, unless it specifies otherwise on the test (which that one does not).
The second link you posted shows the 4960X getting a 9.5 single core, whereas the 4790K gets a 10.0 single core.

I wouldn't worry about the performance; I'm just attempting to explain several reasons why your framerates may be normal. There's no doubt the i7-4960X will outlast any other CPU on the market for years to come, seeing as the rare single-core games don't require even close to the performance any i7 offers, and the newer multi-core games will run better on the 4960X than any other CPU.

Having said that, I certainly hope you bought it for some really heavy rendering or editing tasks, because that's what it's designed for and that's what justifies most of the price increase over the other i7s.

 

[anon1239]

Oh I see, sorry I didn't look carefully enough. Thanks for the new info. Also yes I did purchase the processor for more than gaming, yet I was using Minecraft as something no more simply than a benchmark for my hardware.

I was also wondering why my fps sometimes stays as low as 160 even though my Alienware can match that performance with ease. Is there some setting I haven't ticked on my cpu's settings?

One last question, If I go under task manager it says on the bottom of the window that the cpu usage is usually under 30% unless I am playing games such as Skyrim, heavily modded, or watchdogs. Is this normal or is there another line I can cross to reach a higher usage?

 

[Rationale]

One last question, If I go under task manager it says on the bottom of the window that the cpu usage is usually under 30% unless I am playing games such as Skyrim, heavily modded, or watchdogs. Is this normal or is there another line I can cross to reach a higher usage?

My old Phenom II 955 would max at 75% in Dark Souls whenever the framerate dropped. Every time, like clockwork, just 75%. Turns out 3 of my cores were maxing and the last one was idle, as Dark Souls is firmly a tri-core game. Installing my i3 entirely removed those framerate drops.

So the point is, a CPU won't necessarily hit 100% load if it has multiple cores, it can still bottleneck at lower percentages if some cores are unused. However I'm certain your CPU is not a bottleneck, as core-per-core it's still one of the fastest. It's likely your CPU doesn't go above 30% simply because the extra power is not needed, some other component must be maxing first, usually that's the video card. Minecraft is the only game I know of that will max an Intel CPU before it'll max the video card, clearly due to it using a single core and procedurally generating an entire world on that 1 core.

 

[anon1239]

Hmm... so basically Minecraft creates a bottleneck, being my cpu, because it focuses on single core performance, yet my cpu doesn't use up its full potential because the other cores simply can't be used?

 

[Rationale]

Hmm... so basically Minecraft creates a bottleneck, being my cpu, because it focuses on single core performance, yet my cpu doesn't use up its full potential because the other cores simply can't be used?

Yeah, pretty much.

In single-core games, 5 of your cores will sit idle and mostly unused (just helping a little bit by running Windows and such). In dual-core games, 4 cores will sit idle, and so on. AMD CPUs suffer really badly from this in many games that use few cores, since they have much weaker single core performance, but in very rare cases it can become evident on Intel CPUs as well. Since you're getting like ~1000 fps anyway in a flat world it doesn't really matter. But that's the general idea of what might be happening if other people with similar or weaker rigs are getting better performance. Ofc I have no idea whether the people who get ~4000 fps were exaggerating.

It's also worth noting that HDD speed can affect sudden temporary framerate drops in Minecraft, as new areas load. My i3-4360 and GTX 750 Ti averages 300 fps in Minecraft (normal world), but my HDD is quite ancient and slow, so when a new chunk loads it's common to fall to ~150 fps for a second. Not that it matters.

Partially these limitations are due to the fact that Minecraft's core mechanics were programmed by only one guy with a small budget and little time (he expanded the team later, but that was after the base game was already working), and partially it's because Java doesn't handle large games too well.

Finally, the addition of the "chunks" setting is relatively new to Minecraft. It's been in for several updates now, but there was at least a year or two when it didn't exist. There's always a chance people getting higher framerates were playing before that was added, as the default "8" is much, much easier to run than 16.

If I was in your position, I would try some other games or some artificial benchmarks to make sure your PC is performing as well as it should. Testing just one game doesn't indicate much.

 

[anon1239]

Alright thanks for your time and awesome feedback! I can easily get 60+ fps on watchdogs with max settings and skyrim is but a fomality. League of legends is around 250 average and 400 max. I haven't tried Crysis 3 yet, but I can only say that from the mass amounts of gpu power it requires, my i7 4960x will just have to let those cores sit cold. Thanks again for the feedback, and hopefully next generation games will truley dig into my cpu's full potential.

 

[Rationale]

Alright thanks for your time and awesome feedback! I can easily get 60+ fps on watchdogs with max settings and skyrim is but a fomality. League of legends is around 250 average and 400 max. I haven't tried Crysis 3 yet, but I can only say that from the mass amounts of gpu power it requires, my i7 4960x will just have to let those cores sit cold. Thanks again for the feedback, and hopefully next generation games will truley dig into my cpu's full potential.

DX12 is supposed to allow games to use all CPU cores by default, so that'll certainly help.

 

[anon1239]

Yea true. Do you know if windows 7 will support dx12?

 

[Rationale]

Yea true. Do you know if windows 7 will support dx12?

Nobody seems to be saying, which probably means it won't.

 

[anon1239]

I looked through a couple of different websites and actually found something interesting in this one: http://channel9.msdn.com/Events/Build/2014/9-004. In the interview, they they talk about how windows 7 will actually support directX 12 at 5:30. Luckily for me, I have windows 7, so this will hopefully be beneficial to my performance throughout games in the future.