Improving Performance & Reducing Frame Time Inconsistencies

[wildforester]

I've spent some time trying to improve my installation of BTA, and thought others may as well. My focus was improving FPS without impacting the visuals of the game, your focus may differ. But I believe this will be a good base.

FPS Improvement

• Multi-Draw Renderer
  This is an experimental feature hidden in the debug menu, I have not ran into any issues with it yet. It replaces the Natrium mod if you have it installed and improves FPS a great deal.
  Around 474 -> 988 in my test case. (108% FPS increase!) This option requires a game restart.
  
  You can access the debug menu by clicking in the bottom right corner of either the pause screen or the main menu. Like so:

  

  click guide-min.png (41.26 KiB) Viewed 7144 times

  Then scroll down to "Enable Multi-Draw Renderer (experimental!)" and toggle it on.
  Tiny text for formatting, hi to whoever sees this. Using a screen reader is cheating.
• Advanced OpenGL
  This option is a somewhat poor chunk culling implementation that while working, has some problems, such as the occasional lag spike. It has select circumstances in which it is good to use, it can be enabled in the video settings. (I had a hard time determining what it did, this is my best reference: Minecraft PC’s Advanced OpenGL)
  
  Generally I'd recommend using it at higher render distances. According to that blog it culls entire chunks if you can't see any of said chunk.
  Due to how this works, here are two test cases:
  
  Aboveground: 1240 -> 1260 (2% FPS increase :/ )
  With Advanced OpenGL off I got a higher maximum of 1305.
  
  Underground: 633 -> 686 (8% FPS increase)

Frame Time Consistency
Instead of using the built in vsync option I opted to use Rivatuner Statistics Server to limit my fps. You'll likely want to make RTSS start at login for it to continue working and fyi that this works best when playing in fullscreen.

1. To do so, first get RTSS installed and add Minecraft to it. This reddit post is a good guide on doing that: [GUIDE] Using RTSS to cap Minecraft to achieve SMOOTHEST FRAMERATE
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2. Then calculate out your framerate limit with this equation (round down if you get a decimal number) and in RTSS set the framerate limit to that.

   

   formula.png (1.02 KiB) Viewed 7144 times

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3. Still in RTSS, click setup at the bottom of the window and scroll down to change the frame limiter mode to "front edge sync"
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4. Then in BTA unlimit the framerate and turn off vsync.

[hydra]

Thank you, it helped a lot. Ever since update 7.2 I've been having performance issues with the mod across multiple machines on SMP and nothing really helped. The RTSS trick and the multidraw renderer helped a lot and now I always get stable 60 fps, and the only downside is some tearing but I prefer it to having random frame drops to 30 or less fps. Hopefully in the future this guide won't be necessary with the new renderer.

[wildforester]

If you’re using a 60hz monitor make sure to set the refresh rate in rtss to 59. That should give enough buffer for rtss to compensate for any screen tearing.