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Minecraft CPU Benchmarks: Vanilla 1.20.4

Published: Apr. 14, 2024

Test Information

This test attempts to simulate a start of a new 1.20.4 world with default world generation. It is a basic landscape and the test primarily consists of sprinting up a hill and looking over the scenery - the main effect of this is that more chunks are loaded, which has become quite demanding on performance after the chunk height increase to 384 blocks in Minecraft 1.18.

Of course, for test reproducibility, the area is pre-generated, so no world generation takes place.

The performance measurement begins immediately after the manually initiated chunk reload and ends with the video.

Most in-game settings were left at default. Render distance was set to 20 chunks.

 Detailed Settings

If a setting option is not explicitly mentioned, it was left at the default value. The JVM settings are the same as what the official Minecraft launcher uses.

Java: 1.18 (18.0.2.1)
JVM settings: -Xms512M -Xmx2G -XX:+UnlockExperimentalVMOptions -XX:+UseG1GC -XX:G1NewSizePercent=20 -XX:G1ReservePercent=20 -XX:MaxGCPauseMillis=50 -XX:G1HeapRegionSize=32M
Render Distance: 20 chunks
Max Framerate: Unlimited
VSync: OFF
Brightness: Bright
Master Volume: 25% (Music: OFF)
Mouse Sensitivity: 65
Auto-Jump: OFF
Sprint Keybind: Q
Drop Item Keybind: Left Alt
Pick Block Keybind: ;

Performance Results

Minecraft - Vanilla 1.20.4

2560x1440, NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4070 (Driver 551.86), Average of 3 runs
Default settings, 20 chunk render distance
"Fresh world landscape with typical exploratory chunk loading."

 Average FPS 1% Low FPS
AMD Ryzen 9 7900X3D
170
463
Intel Core i7-12700KF
138
398
AMD Ryzen 7 5800X3D
157
371
AMD Ryzen 5 5600
114
353
AMD Ryzen 5 3600
77
213
AMD Ryzen 5 2600
54
145
Intel Core i5-5675C
19
108
AMD FX-8350
40
95
Intel Core i5-4460
15
86
Minecraft benchmarks by https://nemez.net

The results from newer processors are in general quite impressive in this test, a noteworthy gain to mention is the one from the Ryzen 5 3600 to the Ryzen 5 5600, these CPUs are only a generation apart and launched at the same $199 price. It appears that AMD's newer "Zen 3" architecture changed something that Minecraft particularly likes.

The other observation worth mentioning are the 1% lows of the Core i5-5675C and i5-4460 CPUs, these are relatively old quad-core processors with no SMT, and it is starting to show in full force. They are practically unusable in the latest versions of Minecraft - at least with our rather high 20 chunk render distance - they are very laggy and would often freeze for over a whole second when loading new chunks.

At the upper end of the chart we see pretty much the expected results with the Ryzen 9 7900X3D leading by a comfortable margin over the (much cheaper) Core i7-12700KF. I tested both the 3D V-Cache enabled chiplet of the 7900X3D and the normal chiplet, the 3D V-Cache chiplet produced noticeably higher 1% lows, in-line with the results shown, which are using the full CPU and default Windows scheduling.