Understanding Minecraft Performance (2011)

As alternatives to Optifine (which doesn&#x27;t have many actual optimisations now, as most of the original improvements were implemented in the vanilla game <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;gist.github.com&#x2F;jellysquid3&#x2F;e46882e37907dfbb3d03d26f589b1c6a" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;gist.github.com&#x2F;jellysquid3&#x2F;e46882e37907dfbb3d03d26f...</a>) the Sodium, Lithium and Phosphor optimisation mods are much faster and are fully open source.<p>Sodium in particular has some detailed javadocs for the primary optimisations, if you want to see how it works: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;jellysquid3&#x2F;sodium-fabric&#x2F;blob&#x2F;1.16.x&#x2F;dev&#x2F;src&#x2F;main&#x2F;java&#x2F;me&#x2F;jellysquid&#x2F;mods&#x2F;sodium&#x2F;client&#x2F;render&#x2F;chunk&#x2F;backends&#x2F;gl43&#x2F;GL43ChunkRenderBackend.java" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;jellysquid3&#x2F;sodium-fabric&#x2F;blob&#x2F;1.16.x&#x2F;dev...</a>

Redstone circuits in Minecraft are honestly one of the most fun things I&#x27;ve played in a long, long time. When I first played the game as a HS-er I didn&#x27;t really understand enough about boolean logic or computation to understand it.<p>During shelter-in-place I took another look at it and was totally sucked in. I absolutely love the cool thing the community has come up with. I really like the creative challenge of coming up with new designs for machines that automate away the problems that you have in the game.<p>Honestly, it&#x27;s a real shame the devs don&#x27;t encourage more automation directly. The real reason I stopped playing in the first place is that it quickly just turned into tedious _work_ to collect resources.<p>Another thought I had was that the spatial nature of the thinking that you are doing when you are constructing redstone circuits works really well for my brain. I wish I could leverage that side of my brain when doing programming work. I&#x27;m able to keep a lot more in my working memory when I can reference a component by it&#x27;s location relative to everything else. It&#x27;s hard to describe, but I really quite liked it.

Java still seems to be the main sticking point - Bedrock (C++) seems to have much higher performance these days.<p>(Although, intriguingly, Apple Silicon runs Minecraft under Rosetta 2 much more efficiently than the i9 I was using a month ago - no fan noise, no burnt legs, lasts hours on battery, stable 60fps - despite using higher settings and without quitting everything else first. Roll on an Apple Silicon JVM.)