How to build an amazing experience with the right tweaks, mods, and hardware
Computer games age in dog years, and Minecraft has been around since 2009. So by most measurements, it should be in the old folks’ home, laid back in a recliner, watching reruns of Jeopardy, and gumming some tapioca. Instead, the game is a true phenomenon. Like World of Warcraft or Counter-Strike, it’s fun, plus frequently evolves to keep things interesting.
With this game, you can take several actual months just building your own personal fortress, one digital block at a time. Or you can hop on a multiplayer server and help people build cool stuff until the break of dawn. Each world you create is also randomly generated, so it’s never the same place twice. (If you’ve never tried Minecraft and you’d like a basic introduction, check out http://bit.ly/MPC_MCbeginner for our friendly online guide.)
Some of Minecraft’s huge runaway success—almost 17 million have bought the game—can be attributed to its relatively low system requirements. It’ll run fine on machines that were left behind long ago by other games. But don’t take that to mean you’ll want to play it on integrated graphics, as you can pile up mods to push even high-end hardware to the limit. We’ve the secret sauce ingredients to make this game shine in a way you might never have witnessed before. And of course, we’ll show you three of the most stunning Minecraft PCs you’ve ever seen.
The Game Is Just a Base Starting Point
Millions of Gamers Can't Be Wrong
A screenshot of Minecraft should be a familiar sight to every gamer. You probably went through a MC phase yourself, and haven’t played the game in a few years. Perhaps you feel content with memories and see no need to go back. Well, if you’ve never modded Minecraft, you’re wrong. If you’ve tried one or two texture packs, you’re still wrong. You rode a bicycle when you could’ve been chauffeured in a limousine. That’s OK, we all make mistakes.
Like the game itself, you won’t see the potential until you start digging. We dug deep and found glittering gems. While the default Minecraft is full of blocky objects, ugly textures, and jaggy edges, we can make it look pretty after a half an hour of work. And it won’t cost a dime. Like with Skyrim, there’s a small army of modders adding stuff you didn’t think could exist, from sparkling waterfalls to gently swaying grass.
If you have an entry-level PC, you can still boost your performance. When we started Minecraft back in the day, it was with a single-core AMD Athlon 64 4000+, 2GB of RAM, and a Radeon X1550 with 256MB of GDDR5 onboard, so we sympathize with low-end struggles. Back then, we tinkered with every setting, like a mechanic tuning an aging minivan. And with enough duct tape and elbow grease, we got it to work. Later, we’ll explain the settings that can make a difference with modest hardware.
Talking Rigs with YouTube Phenomenon Jordan "CaptainSparklez" Maron
With almost 8 million subscribers, Jordan Maron, aka CaptainSparklez, is one of the highest-ranked Youtube personalities on Earth and instantly recognizable as a Minecraft celebrity. We caught up with the good Cap’n and grilled him on how he got his start and the hardware he runs. –GU
MPC: You're arguably the original Mineraft YouTube celebrity. Can you tell us how you got on this path?
CAPTAINSPARKLES: I don’t know about the original, nor the celebrity part, but I’ve been doing it for what feels like a while, at least as far as Internet time goes. I was initially shown the game by a friend who was quite bananas about it, so I gave it a try myself, uploaded a few videos, and the reception was pretty super, so I stuck with it.
MPC: So, what's a typical day like for CaptainSparklez?
CS: Nothing too glamorous. Lots of sitting at my computer finding new things to record, recording them, browsing, and reading articles. Occasionally I’ll venture out of my cave into the scary place known as outside for a meeting or some skateboarding.
MPC: Now, onto the hardware...
CS: I’ve got a 3.5GHz Core i73970X running at stock speed, GeForce GTX Titan, 32GB RAM, 500GB SSD, and a 2TB hard drive. I’ve got it hooked up to three 1920x1080 monitors—two 23s and a 24inch.
MPC: Why did you pick those parts?
CS: Given the gaming, editing, 3D animation, and rendering I do, it’s in my interest to have the fastest machine possible, so I just opted for what I felt to be top-of-the-line at the time. It’s probably not the most cost-effective build, but it’s served me very well.
MPC: Do you run any special mods?
CS: No “special” mods, but when I pile on 100 of them, it helps to have good hardware. Even then there can still be a fair amount of lag at points. I suppose some of the shader mods get a performance boost from the Titan; I had some trouble running them on my old machine, but they are pretty flawless now. Those shader mods are super cool, by the way; looks like nothing you’d have thought possible in Minecraft.
MPC: Do you build your own PCs?
CS: This is the b it where I fess up. I don’t assemble my own PCs. I’ve heard too many complaints from friends who built computers only to find they wired something wrong, troubleshoot, then find out a part arrived broken, figure out which one, replace, and repeat the process. It isn’t something I find fun, so I pay the premium to pick up a finished rig a week after ordering.
MPC: What hardware configuration do you recommend for Minecraft?
CS: Folks my consider it overkill, but if you’re playing Minecraft, you’re probably playing other games as well, so as a general PC building recommendation I suggest the Core i74790K. It should do everything you’d hope for a long while to come. I’d also recommend something like a GeForce GTX 760, at least 8GB RAM, and possibly a 256GB SSD if you’re feeling fancy. The whole setup shouldn’t cost too much more than $1,000.
Performance Tips
Don't Get Shafted with Substandard Minecraft Performance
When you start the game and click on the “Options” menu, you’ll see one visual setting: FOV (Field of View). That’s basically the cone of vision in front of you. The “Normal” setting is 70 degrees wide, but the slider goes from 30 to 110. If first-person games make you feel nauseated, you may find some relief by increasing the FOV to 80, 90, or even higher. This will create a sort of fisheye camera effect at the highest level, but it’s preferable to losing your lunch. Click on the “Video settings” to get to the meat of the performance settings.
A wide FOV stretches objects on the edge of the screen but can help with motion sickness.
Graphics has two settings: “Fast” and “Fancy.” The latter enables transparency, shadows, enhanced water effects, and better-looking clouds. Almost every setting in this menu will take effect without requiring a restart, so you can go back and forth to see the effect that different settings have on your performance. If you press “F3” while playing the game, you’ll get a frame rate counter in the upper left-hand corner, among other things. This will put a lot of text on the screen. You can make this smaller by changing the GUI Scale to “Normal” or “Small.”
Unlocking Frame Rates
Setting Smooth Lighting to “Maximum” creates smaller gradients of light from one block to another. The actual Brightness setting has no impact on performance and is purely a matter of taste, though it can help you distinguish certain types of blocks in dimly lit areas. The particle setting determines whether or not you see debris or dust when you run around or chop a tree, and liquid spray.
Vsync attempts to lock your frame rate at 60fps, if your monitor has a 60Hz refresh rate. If your PC can’t maintain that, your fps gets knocked down to 30. If you can’t maintain that, then vsync drops you to 20. And so on. We recommend disabling it and using Adaptive VSync for Nvidia GeForce video cards, or Dynamic VSync for AMD Radeon video cards. This will automatically disable vsync when your fps falls below 60, and reenable vsync when your frame rate goes back up.
Anisotropic filtering increases the sharpness of textures that are distant from the player. This one usually doesn’t impact performance very much, so you should be able to crank it all the way to 16. Render distance determines how much of the game world you actually see around you. Adding more chunks pushes the horizon back, but it can cause stuttering as the game takes a moment to draw that area. The Max Framerate setting can be ignored if you’re running a standard 60Hz monitor. Dynamic / adaptive vsync will override it.
Smoothing It Out
Advanced OpenGL enables a feature called Occlusion Culling, which basically tells your video card to not render things that the player can’t see. Some very old GPUs don’t support this.
Disabling clouds can increase your performance and may help with certain visual glitches. The fullscreen toggle has minimal impact on performance if the game window is already maximized. If you leave fullscreen off, this will make it easier to AltTab to other windows. Mipmap levels smooth out surface detail according to distance from the player, but higher levels need to be balanced with anisotropic filtering to prevent excessive blurriness.
Installing the Optifine mod (detailed in the next section) adds a host of additional video settings that would require an additional article to fully cover. Thankfully, the mod provides pretty informative tool tips that pop up when you hover over each setting. Generally, we recommend only changing a few settings at a time, so you know which one has the most impact (or which one is causing glitches). It also automatically enables the use of a second CPU core (vanilla Minecraft is only single-threaded), which can improve frame rates right away.
Modding Minecraft
Add Features, Boost Performance, and Make Things Pretty
Out of the box, Minecraft is a spiffy game. But it clearly ain’t the belle of the ball. Its blocky objects and pixelated textures are an acquired taste, like black coffee or limburger cheese. And you’ve probably noticed its performance can get pretty chunky, too. Thankfully, a veritable cottage industry of mods has grown up around the game. You can smooth out those textures, or make them even more retro. You can add nice lighting effects, too.
Unfortunately, getting these mods to all play nice with each other is still surprisingly tricky, despite the game being in active development for more than five years now. So let’s start simple, with the texture packs.
A Whole New World
There are piles of websites dedicated to downloadable Minecraft content, but for texture packs (referred to as “resource packs” by the Minecraft community), we stuck mostly to http://ift.tt/Pb6rJV and www.curse.com (the latter of which has content for a bunch of other games, too). We prefer these two sources because of easy navigation and sorting. Pixel count is one thing to sort for. The textures can range from 8x8 pixels to 512x512. For reference, the vanilla textures are 16x16. Higher pixel counts can add realism, but this requires more hardware horsepower. You have to strike a balance depending on your situation. Try to get the most uptodate packs, otherwise you can end up with an awkward mix of modded and vanilla textures.
If you have a 64-bit CPU and a 64-bit operating system, we recommend installing the 64-bit version of Java. Go to java.com, click on the “Free Java Download” button, then click on the link labeled “See all Java Downloads” and select “Windows Offline (64-bit).” This version does not check for updates, though, so you have to remember to do that on your own.
Feeling Resourceful
Some of these packs may instruct you to use MCPatcher HD, a Java program that helps these packs integrate into the game. Just Google the name of the program to find a link to http://ift.tt/yYjzm9 (the official forum) that provides legit download links. Basically, once you’ve Java installed, doubleclick on the MCPatcher file to run it like any other program, and click the “Patch” button on the bottom.
When you’ve downloaded a resource pack, fire up Minecraft, click on the “Options” button, select “Resource Packs,” and click the button that says “Open resource pack folder,” where you can drop in all your packs. Use this opportunity to create a folder shortcut on your desktop. Then click “Done” and the “Resource Packs” button again, and your packs should show up. Click on the one you want to use to activate it, and click the “Done” button again. The more complex the pack, the longer it will take Minecraft to load it up. Windows may even tell you the program is no longer responding. If that’s still the case after a minute, you may need to forceclose the program and try a less complex pack.
Vanilla Minecraft textures date back to the mid 1990s...
...but resource packs such as KoP Photo Realism change everything.
Fifter Shaders of Grey
There are some things that no resource pack can address. What if you want to see tree branches and grass sway in the wind? What if you’re not happy with the way the game’s lighting works? That’s where shader mods come in. Adding these to the game is a three-step process. First, we install a mod loader, then we install the shader framework, and finally, we install the actual shader pack.
The Minecraft Forge API (Application Programming Interface) is our mod loader. Visit http://ift.tt/WU9qQ3 to grab that. As with the resource packs, get the one that matches your game version. There may be “latest” and “recommended” variants. The latter usually has wider compatibility with the available mods. Before installing Forge, run the game once to set its environment correctly, then shut it down. To install Forge, just doubleclick on the “EXE” file to install it like any other program.
Seeking SEUS
Next, you need the GLSL Shaders Mod to enable shader packs. This one doesn’t have its own website and instead resides on the Minecraft forums. If you do a Google search on the mod’s name, the forum link should be your top search result. Download the mod from there, doubleclick on that “resourcepack” desktop shortcut you created earlier, go one folder up to the one labeled “.minecraft,” and open the “mods” folder. Drop the Shaders Mod in here. Go back to “.minecraft” and open the “shaderpacks” folder next.
We used Sonic Ether’s Unbelievable Shaders (SEUS) for this article. It’s available at sonicether.com. If you have a high-end PC, choose an “Ultra” version. Midrange PCs will be better off with “Standard,” and entry-level rigs should stick to “Lite.” Download your chosen version and drop it in your “shaderpacks” folder. Then start Minecraft, select the “Forge” profile from the dropdown menu in the lower lefthand corner, click “Play,” then select “Options,” choose “Shaders,” and click on the name of the shader to activate it.
Here’s some interesting terrain in the vanilla version...
...now add the Traditional Beauty resource pack and SEUS Shaders.
Forging Ahead
Lastly, you can grab the Optifine mod, available at optifine.net, to boost performance and further beef up your visuals. You can use this one with or without Forge. Next choose the right version for you. The “Ultra” version has the most enhancements, “Standard” is the most compatible, and “Light” is good for laptops and budget PCs but won’t work with mod loaders such as Forge. Without Forge installed, just download the “.jar” file and doubleclick to load the installer. With Forge installed, drop the “.jar” file in the “mods” folder mentioned earlier. If you get stuck somewhere, this mod has its own thread on the official forums with detailed advice for troubleshooting.
Minecraft at 4K? Yes and No...
Since Minecraft doesn’t demand much of your hardware, we hooked up an Ultra HD monitor to see what kind of frame rate we would get with the resolution cranked to 3840x2160. At four times the res of a 1080p monitor, things can start to get chunky. But even the integrated graphics of a quad-core Intel Core i5-4570R could maintain around 60fps, as long as we didn’t install any shaders. A system with an Intel Core i7-4770K and a GeForce GTX 780 Ti, meanwhile, flew along at 250–300fps in vanilla mode. When we activated a shader, though, it dropped down to about 35fps. It could be that the shader itself needs some optimization, or that the shaders just put a lot of strain on the GPU. Back down at 1080p, the 780 Ti system maintained about 60fps with all shader effects enabled. Check out the next few pages to get the nitty-gritty on the three systems we built to play Minecraft.
The Gigabyte Brix Pro
This lil' guy will creep up on you
Since Minecraft doesn’t use more than two CPU cores (and even then, not without a mod), and a video card is more of a recommendation than a necessity, we can get up and running with a very compact and portable unit. Enter the Brix Pro series. We reviewed the Intel Core i74770R version in the March issue and gave it our Kick Ass award. This one is nearly identical; the CPU here is the i54570R, which doesn’t have HyperThreading. We still get Intel’s Iris Pro graphics 5200 integrated into the CPU, and the 128MB L4 cache, plus an mSATA slot, 2.5inch drive bay, and a preinstalled 802.11ac WiFi card with Bluetooth 4.0. And with four USB 3.0 ports, an HDMI port, Ethernet port, and mini DisplayPort, we’re not lacking for external connections.
Minecraft Cubed
With a street price of $470, plus buying your own Windows license, RAM sticks, and an internal storage device, the GBBXi54570R is certainly not the cheapest option you’ll find out there. But it has the highest ratio of size to performance we’ve seen so far. As you might have noticed, the little fella is also very cubeshaped, so it lends itself nicely to a themed custom paint job. Another bonus is that it takes very little time to set up. Just remove four screws on the bottom cover, snap in your RAM, remove the SSD tray, install the SSD in the tray, put the tray back, and close her up. You’re done.
Unfortunately, the integrated graphics didn’t play nicely with our shaders, causing the game to crash whenever one was loaded, but we had no trouble with resource packs or the Optifine mod. Considering the performance hit that shaders caused with our beefier systems, the game probably would have chugged anyway. There’s also a little fan inside the Brix Pro, but it didn’t spin up very much during our sessions, and the unit never got hot. However, if you stress all four cores with video encoding or other highly multithreaded activities, you’ll hear it from a few feet away. All in all, we were pretty happy with the results we got.
You can build a solid entry-level gaming PC for this kind of money, so the Brix Pro is not the best option for raw performance or upgradeability. But if you want something super compact and portable, this is your ticket. In fact, if you want this one, you have a chance to win it, as we’re giving it away. Visit http://bit.ly/MPC_mcgiveaway for details of our Creeper-themed Brix Pro giveaway.
The Dynamite Build
It Will Blow You Away
When we used Cooler Master’s Elite 130 case for a “Build It” feature in Maximum PC’s February issue, we thought it wasn’t possible to make a case any smaller and still cram in a full system. Then the company sent us its Elite 110, which is about half as long.
While it’s true that your options are more limited, we discovered it’s still possible to make some sparks fly. The breakthrough is thanks in large part to vendors such as Zotac, Asus, and MSI, who’ve figured out how to miniaturize Nvidia’s GeForce GTX 760 video card, which has a very good priceperformance ratio at around $250.
Get Out My Grill
Zotac’s result is slightly longer than the other two and needs two PCI Express power cables instead of one, but we still end up with a little room to spare, and the case actually takes fullsized power supplies. Our friends at Smooth Creations painted it to look like a TNT block from Minecraft. Unfortunately, painting the front grill simply isn’t practical, as the case needs that opening to create airflow for all the hardworking gear crammed inside. Because of the way the power supply is situated, you can’t put a big cooler on the CPU. But a locked Intel Core i5 CPU is still a very good chip to have running things.
The Gigabyte GAH97NWIFI MiniITX motherboard will take 16GB, but 8GB was fine for our needs. While our CPU and RAM are basically equal to the Brix Pro, this case can take four 2.5inch drives and has a mount for a 3.5inch drive. Add the video card, and you’re on a whole new level of performance.
At 1080p with a 64x64 texture pack, the Optifine mod, and SEUS shaders, our Intel Core i54430 and GTX 760 kept us in the 40–50fps range. Without the shaders, frame rates averaged around 200. At Ultra HD resolutions, we still consistently hit over 60fps, as long as we didn’t load a shader. That would knock the fps down to 15–20.
This is roughly the level of performance we expected. It would be nice to hit the 60fps mark at 1080p, but to achieve that it looks like we’d need to go up a notch on the video card, and maybe overclock the CPU.
Don't Walk on the Grass
It's Armed and Fully Operational
Playing with itsy-bitsy computers is fun and all, but enthusiasts like us will always yearn for a little more power. Well, the Corsair Obsidian 250D case puts few restrictions on the size of your video card or power supply, accommodates a 240mm radiator, and even has a window on the top so you can peek inside. Bingo!
We gathered our own team of super heroes: A GeForce GTX 780 Ti, Intel Core i74770K, Asus ROG motherboard, Enermax Liqtech 240 cooler, and a Seasonic Gseries power supply. This is very similar to September’s “Build It” rig. A key difference is the motherboard. We actually went back a step to Intel’s older Z87 chipset. That’s because, as this issue went to press, there was no high-end miniITX Z97 motherboard, and we wanted to ensure a high overclock, since Minecraft does respond to higher CPU clock speeds (though we received the Maximus VII Impact after we finished our build). We’d need all the clocks we could get after fully tweaking Minecraft’s visuals, as those shaders do a number on your frame rate.
Keeping Our Cool
We could have gone with a Radeon R9 290 or 290X, which both perform in the neighborhood of a 780 Ti for less money, but we wanted a video card whose cooling design would vent most of the GPU’s heat out the back of the case. That meant using the stock cooler, and Nvidia’s run much quieter and cooler in this department than the stock R9 cards. It’s true the Corsair 250D has two 80mm fan mounts in the rear, just above where the motherboard goes, but fans of that size just don’t move a lot of air, unless you’re willing to let them run distractingly loud. You could also use an air cooler on the CPU and put two 120mm case fans where the radiator would go, but you can get a higher CPU overclock with a 240mm liquid cooler.
Speaking of which, the eight-threaded Core i74770K is probably total overkill, since Minecraft uses just a couple of cores. We probably could have gotten away with using that 20th Anniversary Pentium CPU, which we’ve overclocked to 4.7GHz. On the other hand, the plethora of threads in our 4770K lets us do a much wider variety of things, such as encode a video in the background, or watch a 1080p movie on another monitor. It’s very fancy.
Since this system stayed reliably above 60fps at 1080p with shaders loaded, there wasn’t much to tweak, or so it seemed. At 4K, we hovered around 35fps, but we could push it to 40 after overclocking to 4.5GHz on all cores. However, we dug around again for other shader packs, and this time we stumbled on one called “CUDA Shaders.” It doesn’t actually use Nvidia’s CUDA technology, and it’s not as pretty as SEUS to our eyes, but it’s still much neater looking than the vanilla game, and it let us maintain 60fps even at Ultra HD resolution. We picked it up on the creator’s website, http://bit.ly/1dqOo3G. You may actually prefer it over SEUS, so it’s definitely worth a look.
The Learning Curve
Of these three builds, it’s the GTX 760 that we actually had the most fun with. The Cooler Master Elite 110 is a neat little case and fits an impressive amount of stuff. It actually has more storage-device mounting points than the much larger Corsair 250D. And not putting a top-end GPU in the box forced us to get under the hood with graphical settings and figure out what was going on, so we learned more about the game and about GPU behavior than we would have otherwise. And as they say, knowing is half the battle.
Double Up with Optifine
Even at its maximum, vanilla Minecraft can only load 16 chunks (world-high columns of 16x16 blocks) in all directions away the camera, and your redstone contraptions will seize up if their chunk isn’t loaded. Install Optifine (http://optifine.net) and you can put your multi-core CPU and all that RAM to good use, doubling the chunks Minecraft can render at one time while keeping your frame rate slick. That’s over a square kilometre of the world—and the redstone within it—loaded at any one time. –AC
The Painter
Much of the magic with our three ultimate Minecraft builds isn’t necessarily the parts inside, it’s what’s on the outside. The exquisite paint jobs turned otherwise sedate cubes into real-life representations of Minecraft. When it came to getting it done, we turned to none other than the Michelangelo of case painting: Jim Sailing at Smooth Creations. We’ve featured Jim’s work in Maximum PC before—he’s painted numerous Dream Machines for us over the years—so we knew he was capable of shooting our Minecraft builds systems.
What we didn’t expect, though, were the spectacular results. It may be a little hard to tell from our photographs, but these Minecraft machines are gorgeous. Besides the 8-bit aesthetic that transforms our rigs, Smooth Creations hit each box with multiple layers of clear coat to give them a paint job that’s easily smoother than the one on your car. But Jim “Smooth” Sailing doesn’t just shoot PC cases though—his company will beautify laptops, game consoles, and even guitars.
The cost of having a case painted isn’t as crazy as you might think. Smooth Creations apply custom paint or hydro-dipped exteriors for $200 to $400, depending on the complexity of the job—Smooth Creations has to sometimes tear a case down to its base components in order to paint it properly. Visit http://ift.tt/1Ck1jMt for more information. –GU
From maximumpc
from http://bit.ly/1QitWEh
