Now we will go into detail on the settings available within Minecraft and the effect that they will have on your game.
Graphics
Minecraft has two options for its general graphics setting: Fancy and Fast. Fancy enables high quality graphical effects, which includes increased rain particles, leaves being transparent rather than solid blocks, a black vignette present around the edge of the screen in darker areas, and a red warning vignette effect that becomes visible when reaching the world border. Fast disables all of these aforementioned effects, in turn improving performance.
Drag the cursor to compare Graphics on Fast and Fancy.
Render Distance
This option controls how many chunks of the world are visible at once. If fewer chunks are included, the FPS tends to be higher as the game has less to render. Turning this setting up will, in turn, greatly reduce your frame rate. This setting has a slider which ranges from 2 to 32 chunks.
Render distance is commonly referred to as fog, since the most distant terrain fades into the sky color in a way which is reminiscent of fod. This is done to avoid a sharp edge to the visible game world.
Drag the cursor to compare Render Distance on 16 Chunks and 32 Chunks.
Smooth Lighting
This effect uses ambient occlusion in order to smooth lighting across blocks, or add a distinctive light level to specific blocks. It’s settings include off, minimum, and maximum.
Drag the cursor to compare Smooth Lighting Off and Maximum.
Max Framerate
This limits the framerate at which the game will run. This ranges from a minimum of 10 FPS to an option for unlimited frames. For best performance, it is recommended that you limit this to the refresh rate of your monitor, so as to prevent the unnecessary rendering of frames you won’t be able to see, which can overwork your GPU. (Your monitor’s refresh rate is the same as the Hertz. So, if you have a 60 Hz monitor, your refresh rate is 60.)
3D Anaglyph
This allows the player to view the game using 3D glasses, when enabled. This is off by default but can be turned on. This should, of course, only be enabled when playing with 3D glasses.
View Bobbing
This is the option that controls the “bobbing” motion of the camera as the player is walking. It can be toggled on and off. Disabling this effect may very marginally increase performance.
GUI Scale
This controls the size of the GUI (graphical user interface), as well as that of the HUD (heads up display). The options for this setting include Auto, Small, Normal, and Large. Auto will scale the GUI to your monitor resolution, while the others are preset sizes. It is worth noting that if you are playing it on a large resolution, setting this to “Auto” can make the GUI larger than any of the presets.
Brightness
This dims down of increases the light levels of the game’s surfaces. This effect is seen in the night, as well as the day.
Clouds
This setting affects the rendering of clouds in the game. It has three options: Off, Fast, and Fancy. Off causes no clouds to be rendered in the game. Fast causes the clouds to be rendered in 2D, so they are flat. Fancy causes the clouds to be rendered in 3D, making them appear more rectangular.
Drag the cursor to compare Clouds on Fast and Fancy.
Particles
This setting allows certain particle effects to appear, though the block breaking particles are not affected by enabling or disabling this setting. The three levels of this setting, in order from least to most particles, are “Minimal,” “Decreased,” and “All.” These effects include falling particles, particles from both lava and water, and sprinting particles. In the “Minimal” setting, specifically, rain is silent and the hearts that ordinarily appear around mobs in Love Mode do not appear. Both of these things aren’t the case when it is on the other settings.
Drag the cursor to compare Particles on Minimal and All.
Fullscreen
This setting allows the user to put Minecraft into fullscreen mode, or keep it in a window. This can also be toggled at any time via the use of the F11 key.
Use VSync
When turned on, this limits your framerate to your monitor’s refresh rate. This is typically something like 60Hz or 144Hz. Enabling this can fix issues such as tearing. On the flip side, it increases input latency and may cause stuttering if your computer lacks the ability to render the same frames per second as the refresh rate of your monitor.
Mipmap Levels
This option affects how smooth the textures look. The higher the level, on a slider that ranges from 1 to 4, the smoother the textures will appear to look.
Drag the cursor to compare Mipmap Levels Off and on Level 1.
Drag the cursor to compare Mipmap Levels on Level 2 and Level 4.
Alternate Blocks
This setting toggles alternate block models. If this is turned off, the least complex highest priority model is the one that will always be used. If you would like a variety in the models, this is recommended to be kept on.
Drag the cursor to compare Alternate Blocks Off and On.
Use VBOs
This setting toggles vertex buffer objects. This allows the rendering to be done right within the GPU, by allowing it to use VRAM instead of RAM in order to render objects. This makes no visual difference, but will increase performance if you have a lot of VRAM.
Entity Shadows
This setting determines whether entities (such as mobs) will display simple shadows. Having this enabled makes those shadows appear. It can be toggled on or off.
Drag the cursor to compare Entity Shadows Off and On.