Minetest 5.7.0 out now with graphics improvements, performance upgrades

Free and open source voxel sandbox game engine Minetest, largely known for comparisons to Minecraft, has a big update out in version 5.7.0. Sounds like a really great release too with plenty of new features and upgrades to the engine.

There's some new graphical features that have been added with post-processing implemented, like bloom and dynamic exposure. The developers said they do plan to add more effects in future like depth-of-field, volumetric lighting and others. Mods and Games will have full control over it all too.

A big performance win is the changes to make better use of your GPU, which they said gives "vastly improved performance on modern hardware at 500+ view ranges". As an example of it they showed a screenshot of it running on Steam Deck with a 600 view range that gives 53FPS whereas before the optimisation it would get 10FPS.

There's also been other optimizations done too like the occlusion culling, for not rendering areas that cannot be seen and some more multi-threading has been added too. A nice adjustment for modding is that worlds won't load if a mod doesn't have all of its other content dependencies, instead of just loading with them disabled causing confusion and other problems.

See more in the release blog post.