If there's one thing Minecraft needs it's better performance amongst a lot of other things. Thankfully they have been working on it, and it's already showing.
Previously when scouting a new area on Minecraft you would see the landscape slowly pop in little by little as the game loaded new chunks of data, but with a new "Use VBOs" video setting it's much much quicker and that's awesome. They aren't done yet though, as they are still planning on making it even quicker in future.
Check out these two rough video's I whipped up just to show it off.
Old rendering
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=il3lLqrS-sk
New rendering
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l_4E4-GDiZ4
Considering the world it generated when I was using this new threaded rendering had a big mountain amongst other things it really shows how much quicker it is. Also note to self: find video menu before recording.
You can see on the old style the landscape gradually built itself and bits were gradually popping in, but in the new video it was almost instant which is fantastic. It's kind of crazy to think Minecraft rendering has been left this slow for so long, but that doesn't stop the improvements being very welcome especially for people making massive builds of crazy things.
Once Minecraft has a modding API I may take another look at it, but to setup the game to be interesting and have mods wiped on a new update is too annoying right now. They are still working on that, but changes like this do move it slowly towards an API as they re-do each system.
You can try out the new system in the Minecraft launcher by clicking Edit Profile and selecting to use experimental builds.
Check out the snapshot information on their blog here.
Minecraft is a fantastic collaborative sandbox building game if you like that sort of thing, but with no quests and extremely simple combat it's not to everyone's taste. Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.
Previously when scouting a new area on Minecraft you would see the landscape slowly pop in little by little as the game loaded new chunks of data, but with a new "Use VBOs" video setting it's much much quicker and that's awesome. They aren't done yet though, as they are still planning on making it even quicker in future.
Check out these two rough video's I whipped up just to show it off.
Old rendering
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=il3lLqrS-sk
New rendering
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l_4E4-GDiZ4
Considering the world it generated when I was using this new threaded rendering had a big mountain amongst other things it really shows how much quicker it is. Also note to self: find video menu before recording.
You can see on the old style the landscape gradually built itself and bits were gradually popping in, but in the new video it was almost instant which is fantastic. It's kind of crazy to think Minecraft rendering has been left this slow for so long, but that doesn't stop the improvements being very welcome especially for people making massive builds of crazy things.
Once Minecraft has a modding API I may take another look at it, but to setup the game to be interesting and have mods wiped on a new update is too annoying right now. They are still working on that, but changes like this do move it slowly towards an API as they re-do each system.
You can try out the new system in the Minecraft launcher by clicking Edit Profile and selecting to use experimental builds.
Check out the snapshot information on their blog here.
Minecraft is a fantastic collaborative sandbox building game if you like that sort of thing, but with no quests and extremely simple combat it's not to everyone's taste. Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.
0 Likes
Some you may have missed, popular articles from the last month:
The comments on this article are closed.
All posts need to follow our rules. For users logged in: please hit the Report Flag icon on any post that breaks the rules or contains illegal / harmful content. Guest readers can email us for any issues.
The landscape is gradually popping up in the second video too. I think you're affected by a placebo effect. 
If I understand correctly, VBO (vertex buffer objects) improve FPS but doesn't help with world calculation.
If I understand correctly, VBO (vertex buffer objects) improve FPS but doesn't help with world calculation.
0 Likes
Yes it is still popping in, but it's a lot faster if you try it for yourself you will see.
1 Likes, Who?
It really is a lot faster. The "jerkiness" of exploring a very large undiscovered area via flying is gone.
0 Likes
Qantourisc 21 Jul 2014
If I understand correctly, VBO (vertex buffer objects) improve FPS but doesn't help with world calculation.
You are right as I understand it though, optimizations and threading is what fixed that I think.
VBO are basically a block of OpenGL instructions which are stored GPU. This way you can just tell the GPU: do these instructions again. Good examples are static meshes, or skyboxes.
Helps most in slow programming languages, as these suffer the most from submitting each and every vertex. (Not saying other languages don't profit a lot from it too)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vertex_Buffer_Object
0 Likes
Patreon
PayPal
See more from me