Even if you’re not bent on heavily modding Minecraft, every player should install Optifine. Today we’re going to dig into the guts of Optifine and highlight all the ways you can use it to optimize your Minecraft experience whether you’re on a powerhouse gaming rig or an old laptop.
Why Use Optifine
While we wouldn’t devote an entire lesson to a single gameplay-tweaking mod, we can’t stress enough how great Optifine is and why you should install it and seriously configure it. Not only is Optifine great for all computers running Minecraft (Mojang, as much as we love Minecraft, has been a little sloppy with their GPU and graphic optimization code), it can take a computer that barely renders Minecraft and provide a playable experience.
One of our laptops, for example, is a super slim ultrabook from a few years back. Great battery life, great portable profile, but not so great in the GPU department. The ultrabook was made for great battery life and a slim form factor, not serious gaming. Without Optifine the computer renders vanilla Minecraft at 3-6 FPS and the game is choppy and unplayable. With Optifine on the default settings it will play Minecraft at 15 FPS; with additional tweaking it will play Minecraft at 24-30FPS or so. While we can’t promise that level of improvement, we have yet to install Optifine on a machine and not see either the concrete FPS rise and/or the overall performance improve.
Let’s take a look at the guts of the Optifine menu and break down what the options found therein do. If you’ve stumbled upon this article without reading the previous Minecraft modding tutorial, we’d strongly urge you to jump back and give it a solid read over before continuing. If you already have a modded copy of Minecraft and Optifine installed, continue onward.
Configuring Optifine: A Point-by-Point Breakdown
It’s really easy to get lost in the Optifine configuration menu, despite the pretty well developed hover-tips that appear when you mouse over a given button or option. Let’s take a look at each setting one by one, working out way first through the single toggles on the main Video Settings page (those items that have no sub-menus) and then looking at the sub-menus individually.
For ease of reference we’ll use a table with the setting on the left-hand side and the explanation on the right. Several settings are present in both regular Minecraft and Optifine; we’ll note when they are and explain what’s different.
Video Settings: General
Video Settings: Details
Now we’re starting to get into the realm of completely Optifine-only settings; as such we’ll no longer be noting that things are Optifine or vanilla Minecraft as every setting here on out is all Optifine-based. This sub-menu governs the small details in the game like cloud styles and astronomical details.
The individual settings in this sub-menu can all be toggled to provide a very small performance boost by decreasing the load on the GPU. Toggling a single setting will likely have next-to-no noticeable benefit, but if your computer is struggling, toggling several (or all of them) from the highest setting (typically “Fancy”) to the lowest setting (“Fast” or “Off”) will free up resources and boost your FPS.
Video Settings: Animations
We’re going to break away from the table format for this section because everything in the Animation submenu is a simple binary On/Off, save for three buttons.
In this sub-menu you can toggle 17 different in-game animations: water, fire, redstone, flames, void particles, rain splashes, portion particles, terrain, textures, lava, portals, explosions, smoke, water, portal particles, dripping water/lava, and item animations.
In addition you can opt to adjust the density of particles from “All” to “Decreased” to “Off” to adjust how many particles from the different animations appear on-screen. There’s also two buttons at the very bottom for toggling all the settings on or off.
Yes, decreasing or eliminating animations will increase performance. We’d caution you to do it selectively, however, as some of the animations are very useful and provide in-game feedback. Rain splashes, for example, are purely cosmetic. Water/lava drips on the other hand, indicate that directly above the block you’re looking at there is water or lava — a key in-game feedback mechanism that will keep you from being flooded into the bottom of a cave or burned alive. Further, if you turn off item animations the in-game animations tools like the clock and compass break because they are no longer animated.
At the same time, you can use this menu to solve annoyances too. We happen to strongly dislike the way potion particles swirl around your field of view so obtrusively, so we often decrease the particle count or turn the potion particles off altogether.
Video Settings: Quality
The Quality sub-menu is concerned with the quality of the graphics rendering. The settings here deal primarily with custom textures, colors, and biomes.
Video Settings: Performance
The settings in this sub-menu are focused entirely on FPS, rendering, and chunk updates.
Video Settings: Other
This sub-menu has a handful of settings that have no better home or, like Weather, seem like they should have been placed elsewhere.
The settings here are primarily concerned with adjusting the game experience or debugging.
Tips for Optifine Optimization Happiness
Now that we’ve dug through the entire list of potential Optifine optimizations, a word on using the mod frustration free.
By default, the Optifine settings are optimized, based on the version of Optifine you downloaded, to work the best for the highest number of people. Before you start toggling a single setting we’d encourage you to play the game for at least 15-30 minutes to get a sense of what causes lag. This will, in turn, give you an idea of which of the above settings you need to tweak.
When you do begin tweaking your settings, we strongly suggest two things. First, set your FPS rate to “Max” so that you can see how the FPS rate fluctuates without an artificial cap. Normally there is no need to set your FPS rate to anything higher than your monitor’s refresh rate (e.g. 60, 120, or 144) because any extra frames will go unnoticed. During testing however, those FPS spikes and drops serve as a useful metric.
The second thing we’d urge you to do is to make small changes and then play for a few minutes. See how the changes affect your game play and, even if the changes seem to have a negative impact, sometimes it helps to quit to the main screen and then reload the world for a fresh start with the new settings.
By taking it slow and restarting the world to asses major changes in Optifine’s settings, you’ll get a better sense of what settings are actually improving your experience.
