Thank you for all this info, I was looking into a system for my son and this is so helpful!
I ended up getting him a prebuilt system with the following specs: CPU Ryzen 7 5700X 4.6GHz, 16GB RAM, 1TB SSD, GPU RX 6700 XT 12GB. I'm curious what kind of FPS he should be getting with this configuration, with the adjustments you listed above (Improve FPS (by a large amount) with a moderate impact on visuals). I wasn't able to allocate more RAM (I don't see the “Edit Profile” option it the minecraft launcher). He is getting 60FPS and says its pretty good and smooth but was hoping to have better graphical settings (like being able to increase the render distance). Any advice would be appreciated. Thank you!

Theoretically, a machine with an R7 5700X and an RX 6700 XT should be capable of hundreds of FPS in Minecraft at 1080p with high settings.

Is he getting exactly 60 FPS most of the time? Because if so, that would be a strong indication that V-Sync is enabled. Vertical Sync aims to eliminate screen tearing by limiting FPS to exactly the refresh rate of the monitor (typically 60 Hz). V-sync can be enabled via the in-game settings, or via the general graphics card control panel for the system. To see FPS figures above 60, you'd need to have it turned off in both locations.

Now, if that's not the source of the issue, I'd be interested to hear more about the situation. What resolution is he running the game at? Are ray-tracing settings enabled? And are any mods or shaders installed?

Thank you, but do you know what the best tier would be for running 125-150 FPS without dipping under 75?
Thanks again,
Abe

For getting 125+ FPS on average in Minecraft with max settings (even with some mods/shaders) at 1080p, we'd recommend at least the 'Good' tier of our general build recommendation chart. For 1440p, at least the 'Very Good' tier. And for 4K, at least the 'Superb' tier.

Thank you so much!

I have a question.
Does the FPS lower while i'm playing in multiplayer servers? (I'm pretty sure it does, I just wanted to check.)
What tier do you think I will need to run a constant 150 FPS in multiplayer servers, from lowest tier to highest necessary tier?
Based on what it says in the description, I will probably get a higher tier CPU and lower tier GPU, but does the graphics processor really impact the looks/FPS in a Minecraft game?

Thanks, Abe.

Yes, FPS is likely to be lower in multiplayer. There are a few reasons performance might be noticeably worse on multiplayer servers. First, the presence of other player avatars are a source of additional computation and rendering for your machine. Second, the introduction of internet latency and stability concerns could lead to lag, glitching, or stuttering which you (or your monitoring method) could interpret as a lower framerate. And third, the server could be implementing a mod or shader that affects performance.

Now, a noteworthy feature of all three of those factors---which is why we don't have a dedicated set of recommendations for them or modded gameplay in the guide---is unpredictability. They vary from server to server and moment to moment in a way that we can't account for with general build suggestions. There is no way for us to say there's a tier we can be certain will never dip under 150 FPS under any circumstances in a custom multiplayer Minecraft server. All you can really do in that regard is bump your choices up a couple tiers (budget permitting) and hope for the best.

And as to your last question, a powerful GPU would make the biggest difference in the event of enabling ray-tracing effects, using mods or shaders, and/or running the game at a high resolution like 4K.

My son is looking to build a PC he can use for Minecraft speed runs. He will also be playing modded games too on occasion. I'd like to help him get a configuration that will meet these needs now but also give him the chance to upgrade the parts later for other games he may decide to play. What tier should I look into?

You're in luck, for two reasons!

First, Minecraft is a very easy game for modern hardware to run, and (as far as I know) there are no strategies in popular Minecraft speedrun categories that are hardware-dependent. So, provided 1080p and 60 FPS is enough for your son, any tier from the 'Entry' tier onwards (or probably even the 'Minimum' tier in a pinch) should be totally sufficient.

Second, you don't need to worry too much about upgrade potential, because all of the builds in our main chart are designed with some power headroom and are built in mid tower or full tower cases. The result of those choices is that every tier is very amenable to upgrades. The hardest part to upgrade in the future would be the CPU---which tends to be true regardless of earlier build choices---but it should be very straightforward to upgrade the GPU, RAM, and/or hard drive space as desired. That said, if 'future-proofing' is a major concern then I'd say the next logical line to consider would be the 'Very Good' tier, as it's the first one with both a better CPU and a higher-Wattage PSU than the 'Entry' tier.

Thank you!

Where do you get a 144hz 1600x900 monitor?

You don't! As far as I know, there are no such monitors. But that doesn't preclude a person from running the game at 1600x900 on a higher-resolution monitor in order to maximize frame rate, nor from getting frame rates that high on a native 1600x900 monitor (albeit without much benefit in the latter situation, due to the restriction of the refresh rate).

Then how do I get 600+ fps?

So, the refresh rate of the monitor (such as 60 Hz, 144 Hz, etc) is separate from the frame rate of the game. Unless V-Sync is enabled, there should be no limitation on frame rate imposed by the monitor's refresh rate, and (hardware permitting) you should be able to get 600 FPS even on a system with a 60 Hz monitor. You just wouldn't be getting much visual benefit from the number being beyond 60 in that scenario.

To put it another way, high-tier systems---or mid-tier systems running the game at low settings---can get very high frame rates, but there are currently extremely few monitors with refresh rates above 240 Hz. This means that frame rates above 240 FPS (which are very achievable in Minecraft) will provide little to no benefit for most players.

Ok, what monitors do you suggest I get to get the maximum frame rates? Thank you!

Again, there is no direct relationship between monitor choice and frame rate.

Your frame rate will ultimately be determined exclusively by your CPU choice, GPU choice, and RAM choice, together with the internal resolution setting and other graphical settings you choose within Minecraft.

So, even if you get a cheap modern 1080p screen, you can still set the game to 720p and get the same frame rates as someone playing with the same hardware on a 720p monitor.

That said, if what you're really curious about is what monitor to choose in order to get the highest possible frame rate while setting the game to the monitor's native resolution---then the answer would be one of the lowest-resolution monitors you can find (probably 1600x900 or 1280x720, unless you can find an old 4:3 display).

Ok, thank you!

Alienware just released a 1080p 500Hz monitor.

Wow, that's a high refresh rate!

Hi! What is the maximum render distance on a medium tier to go more than 50 FPS?

Unfortunately, a question like that about a specific frame rate goal with a specific graphical setting for a specific build is a bit too narrow for us to be able to answer it easily. I think your best bet for getting info about that would be looking for one or more videos on YouTube of someone testing a system in Minecraft similar to your preferred tier across different combinations of settings.

Hello, so I have a Gen 6th i7-6700 CPU along with 32 gb Ram, a GTX NVIDIA GeForce GTX 750 and 256 SSD with one TB HHD. This was considered a near top of the line pc when we first got it; but it’s 6 years old now. It has windows 10 and CAN NOT upgrade to windows 11. It doesn’t even have a constant 60 FPS frame rate anymore, on what I believe is 1080 quality and max settings despite over clocking. Where would this rank?

I also plan to get a brand new PC soon, with an i9-12700k, GeForce RTX 3060 Ti (or no Ti), 1 TB SSD, 1 TB HHD and the same amount of Ram (32 gb), but because it’s a newer pc I would guess the Ram speed by default is a lot faster. It also will be windows 11 compatible. It would be a prebuilt one. Where would this rank?

Lastly, what kind of performance increase can I expect with an upgrade I’ve shown, also taking account the upgrade in windows?

In the present day, a PC with an i7-6700 and a GTX 750 would be roughly comparable to the 'Entry' tier of the chart above (i.e. an R3 3100 and an RX 560).

A PC with an i9-12900K and an RTX 3060 Ti, meanwhile, would fall in between the 'Outstanding' and 'Exceptional' tiers of the same chart.

In particular, an i9-12900K is almost 50% more powerful than an i7-6700, and an RTX 3060 Ti is over 7 times as powerful as (over 700% better than) a GTX 750.

The hardest question to answer here is your last one: what kind of performance increase can you expect? That depends on many variables: the games you'll be playing, the resolution and settings level you'll be playing at, whether the games are online or offline, whether you ever play with any programs open in the background, and (a big unknown at this point) the exact difference in gaming performance between Windows 10 and Windows 11. But even with all of that uncertainty, with a leap in component power as big as the one you're considering, the improvement should be---to say the least---noticeable.

I’ll be playing minecraft most commonly at 1080p resolution. I normally do o play with mods a lot. Extremely heavy mods. Some of them graphical. And I have a lot of single player world latency. On top of all the other performance boost, the single player world latency is what I want improved the most. In vanilla I have maxed setting. In the modded I have mostly maxed setting but with 8-10 chunk render distance which I may increase after this. I’m mostly asking about Minecraft, but garrys mod with plenty of adding, arma three, GTA 5 as well. Oh and I meant i9-12900k. Not 12700k, I’m getting the i9 not the i7.

Thank you for clarifying about the CPU. To be totally clear, since I originally made the same typo in my response: the stats I mentioned there are for the i9-12900K, not the i7-12700K. At any rate, I think you'll be very pleased. Mods can definitely introduce a lot of additional performance uncertainty for folks like us that try to estimate how a PC will handle a game, but all of the games you've listed are over 7 years old, so at 1080p a modern top-tier system should run them absolutely phenomenally---leaving tons of headroom for mods and shaders.

Thank you for the response! For some of these minceraft worlds with plenty of mods, Tick lag in single player has become an issue. And me looking it up came to little aid since all I got was stuff about multiplayer. The one thing that was for single player did mention that a stronger cpu would help, and minecraft is all single threaded stuff and the i9-12900k is the best, even compared to the ryzen thread rippers, etc, with single thread performance. But since I'm still waiting on that PC, is there anything I can do for my current pc that would help with tick lag? So far I've reduced render range, installed several performance mods, overclocked my cpu, have 12 gb of ram allocated (with over 7-8 being allocated while in game.. yes I'm serious, a LOT of heavy mods lol), and set it's priority to high in the task manager. Have I done all I can do?

Well, you could still overclock the GPU and---if possible---migrate the game files to an SSD. But CPU power is indeed the biggest factor in tick lag. So, if you've already optimized the game and optimized your hardware, there is just one thing that might improve performance (but may be unacceptable to you): reducing the resolution.

Welp. I got the New PC. With everything and even more including DDR5 RAm at 4400 mhz up from 2400, Wi-fi 6, etc. Though the 3060-ti is just 3060. Fps lag is nearly non-existent in my very heavy modpack and tick lag has been greatly improved but still a thorn in my ass. Think the 50% improvement in effective speed. If an over-clocked i9-12900k can't eradicate tick lag from existence... I don't think anything can lol. I need to congratulate myself. I have officially created the only modpack that no PC can run without an issue lmao. That being said, what else can I do besides hunting for the mod(s) responsible for this?

Realistically? Uh, I suppose you could write to Microsoft and request that they change how the game is programmed so that it doesn't have to wait for everything to load per tick. (Only joking, of course.) Basically, it sounds like your upgrade has been an incomparably effective experiment to prove that the hardware is not necessarily the main cause of the tick lag. Just as you said, if a system with a brand new i9 can't get rid of it, then it's very likely that nothing currently available would be able to do so. Tinkering with the installed mods is the best recourse at this point.

Lmao yeah. I wish they would make minecraft take advantage of multiple cores. Fps went from 20 to 200, tick lag greatly improved, but there's no cpu available right now that can handle as many instructions processed per cycle as this modpack needs lol. Either the pack is just too heavy or one or more of the mods have bad coding. 1.7.10 is nowhere near as optimized as optimized as later versions like 1.12.2 for all this stuff though, which doesn't help. Garry's mod certainly had it's own huge performance improvements too. Everything seems to be a lot faster. I plan on upgrading to the 3060 to the 3060 ti later.

Would the gpu really help?

The GPU working faster could help, but it's far from a guarantee. Overclocking it for Minecraft performance would be something of a 'last resort' attempt. The same is true of freeing up space for all relevant files on the SSD.

And as for Garry's Mod, it is indeed a very popular game! But unfortunately, it is not as popular as it used to be, and it is already somewhat difficult for us to justify the amount of time and resources that goes into making these guides for new, wildly popular games in their first blush of success. So we don't have any resources or research about Gmod to share with you. (Sorry for the inconvenience.)

No problem. You think it might be similar to GTA V?

Given its engine, out of the games we have guides for, it is more likely to be similar in performance data to Dota 2.

Gotcha. Soo, how much would a DDR4 to DDR5 from 2400 mhz to 4400 mhz boost my performance? 32gb of ram on both.

I'm guessing that this is a somewhat moot question based on your more recent comment---but just in case you are still curious, the answer is: a fair amount of difference! You're describing nearly doubling your effective memory speed at the same capacity. If memory speed was a big factor in the issues you've been facing, then that particular part of the upgrade ought to translate into a considerable improvement.

Overclocked my CPU, yeah, not much more I can do at this point. And SSD is so full that it would do more harm than good. With all the mods there's about 8 gb of RAM allocated at any given point out of 12. I have like 400 mb left on the SSD. Also, can you tell me what's good for Garry's mod in particular? It's a pretty popular game lol, I thought there would be a guide for it.

which rtx 30 series would be good enough for modded minecraft with lets say a 64 resolution resourcepack and ray tracing at the same time? I want a little more pixels in each block and want silky smooth over 60 frames.. I know there are some crazy high res texture packs that even the 3090 struggles with while running ray tracing.

I'm sorry to say that this is a question we simply can't answer with any certainty. As you reference in that last sentence, there is simply a huge amount of variance in performance impact between different mods, shaders, and texture packs (as well as between different combinations of mods, shaders, and texture packs). This makes it more-or-less impossible to give any guidance about meeting a specific standard (like 60 FPS) when mods are involved. That's why we restrict our recommendations in this guide to vanilla Minecraft. Sorry for the inconvenience.

There are no entities on the entity shadow on/off comparison image

Yes, unfortunately, that is true. No idea what Matthew was trying to show with those shots. At this point, though, that useless comparison has been in this article for many years (and Matthew hasn't worked with us in just as long), and it would now be a relatively poor use of our limited time and resources to get another team member a copy of Minecraft to replace it. At any rate, sorry about that.

would this be good? RTX 3060Ti and Ryzen 5 5600X

Absolutely! A PC with an R5 5600X and an RTX 3060 Ti would be at the level of the 'Excellent' tier of our general build recommendation chart, so we would expect it to be capable of 200-400 FPS in vanilla Minecraft at 1080p with max settings.

Yo, how good would the 11600k and the 1650 super be? Im planning on just getting a budget minecraft pc but im not fully sure about parts but i always hear about these

A PC with an i5-11600K and a GTX 1650 Super would have overall gaming performance that is roughly comparable to the 'Good' tier of our general build recommendation chart, so we would expect it to be capable of 144-200 FPS in Minecraft at 1080p with max settings.

Does anybody know if the 6900xt, vs the 3080 ti, vs the 3090 are better? I know that they can vary in perf depending on game and was wondering about the performance with raytraced shaders. I'm sorry if there's already a comment about it just let me know. I did a quick skim and didn't see one!

It is a very close call, but from the scattered benchmarks I've seen on YouTube of those three cards with ray tracing stuff in Minecraft, it looks like the RTX 3090 still ekes out a slight victory (especially if playing at a resolution above 1080p, like 1440p or 4K).

Cool, thanks for the response I appreciate it. :)

Yoooo,im looking to buy a pc mainly for minecraft for around £500 ($690.75). What is the best pc i can build around this price range that will give me the best possible FPS for a £500 pc for minecraft.

Well, it's tough to give a definite answer based on a budget right now, due to the way that parts are rapidly going in- and out-of-stock and prices are spiking in response. But at least in theory, £500 could be enough to build the 'Entry' tier of our general build recommendation chart, which we would expect to be capable of 90-144 FPS in vanilla Minecraft at 1080p with max settings.