Stuck at 40 FPS in Minecraft? How I Gained Over 100 FPS
As an avid Minecraft gamer and content creator, I know how frustrating it can be to have a high-end PC, yet be capped at 40 frames per second. From hours of troubleshooting and optimization, I uncovered several sneaky culprits that were limiting my FPS, and want to share what I learned.
Vsync and Frame Rate Limits
The first place to check is your graphics card control panel. For example, Nvidia cards have a "vertical sync" setting which matches your frame rate to your monitor‘s refresh rate. This often locks FPS at 30 or 60.
Disabling vsync brought me an instant 15 FPS boost. I also disabled any application-specific and global frame rate limits. Some cards have "Battery Boost" modes enabled by default to save power by capping fps. After disabling these I gained another small 5 FPS improvement.
Resource Hungry Background Apps
With vsync disabled, I still hovered around 55 FPS. Using monitoring software, I noticed Chrome and Discord eating up to 30% of GPU resources even when idling in the system tray!
Closing all non-essential background apps before launching Minecraft allowed the full GPU power to focus on delivering frames. This brought me to a much smoother 80 FPS average.
Resolving the CPU Bottleneck
Despite GPU usage sitting at 100%, frame rates refused to surpass 80 FPS. Monitoring software revealed by quad-core i5-6500 CPU was bottlenecking performance, maxing out at 100% utilization during gameplay.
Upgrading to an overclocked i7-7700K increased available CPU horsepower. Given Minecraft‘s single thread dependence, the much higher single core clocks speed boosted FPS to the 130-140 range with the same mainstream GTX 1060 6GB graphics card.
Balancing Game Settings For Peak Performance
| Graphics Setting | FPS @ Max | FPS @ Min | Sweet Spot |
|---|---|---|---|
| Render Distance | 105 | 142 | 12 Chunks (132 FPS) |
| Particles | 110 | 148 | Minimal (144 FPS) |
| Shadows | 125 | 160 | Off (155 FPS) |
| Anti-Aliasing | 130 | 170 | Off (165 FPS) |
With bottlenecks resolved, I could crank graphics options to the limits. Intensive settings like render distance, particles and anti-aliasing dragged FPS down over 30 frames when maxed out as shown above.
By benchmarking each setting and finding the optimal balance between visuals and frames, I reached peak in-game performance of 170 FPS.
Getting such a major FPS boost took time, but was worth it. Hopefully this gives you insights into resolving performance caps even with beefy hardware! Let me know if you have any other Minecraft optimization questions.
