What types of issues would cause very poor frame rate in games like Minecraft?

Question

I am trying to assist a friend of mine in getting minecraft running on his computer so he can play on my server. I got everything installed and running but there is a serious issue. When he loads up the game his framerate takes a huge dive. Originally he was down to 4 - 5 FPS. After working some clever magic with tools like OptiFine and Fastcraft I was able to bump his FPS up to around 30 - 35 FPS which is a huge boost for him. But considering that he has an actual discreet grahpics card that is far from okay.

What I have do so far;

• Updated Graphics card drivers to latest version, they were pretty far behind.
• Updated his copy of Java to latest version.
• Tweaked various setting in the game such as render distance and type of render math (fast or slow).

Basically I am all out of ideas, of the 5 people that play on the server he is the only one having issues.

Here is the specs of the machine that I know.

• CPU: Intel Core 2 Quad Q6600
• RAM: 8GB
• GPU: Nvidia GTX 460 w/ 1GB of GDDR5

Also something else that should be noted, it does not appear to be the GPU because he plays other games like Theif (the 2014 one) with no issue at all. That game I would think is WAY more intense to the GPU than Minecraft.

Answer 1

There's couple of things to do to optimize Minecraft:

1. Use mods to optimize Minecraft - It will do something like disabling the Main Menu Background to optimize Minecraft.

2. Lower your view distance - It's obvious that loading too much textures will lag your game.

3. Make your GUI bigger - It helps a bit, but not much in vanilla minecraft. The reason making the GUI bigger is to decrease things that has to be update in your screen (Block some textures by enlarging the GUI). Also if you're using NEI, this definitely helps decreasing items show up in the item list.

4. Use JVM arugments - Here's what I'm using, might optimize the game extremely well or lag your game, test it. -Xms2560M -Xmx2560M -XX:MaxPermSize=256M -XX:+UseConcMarkSweepGC -XX:+CMSIncrementalMode -XX:-UseAdaptiveSizePolicy -Xmn1024M

5. Use a lower resolution texture pack - It helps decreasing the textures that needs to be load up.

6. More ticks can be found here - http://www.minecraftforum.net/forums/support/unmodified-minecraft-client/tutorials-and-faqs/1871623-minecraft-speed-optimization-guide-v-2-4_1-updated

Answer 2

Unfortunately you are doing all you can, unless you want to use minecraft for windows 10. This is because minecraft (the original) is written in java which is pretty much all processed by the CPU (and unfortunately there is no way to make the GPU do this as it cannot). The new minecraft (for windows 10) has been re-coded and so takes advantage of the whole system, unfortunately this isn't much use to you unless you are willing to move everyone over to it (I think).

And so in conclusion the only way you can run it at a better speed is to upgrade the CPU, or the whole build.