Performance Tweaks

Performance Tweaks for Valhelsia modpacks.

General

First, make sure you've allocated sufficient memory (see Allocating Memory).

AMD Radeon Graphics Cards / GPUs

If you're using an AMD graphics card, one of the best performance improvements you'll get is by adjusting the mipmap settings. In some cases people have reported getting 2000%-3000% better frame rates from this one change alone.

• In the video settings menu, slide the mipmap levels slider from 4 to 0.

This change does have some performance improvements for nVidia users as well, but the improvements are smaller.

In addition to changing the above setting, further performance improvements can be obtained by adding OptiFine (see the OptiFine guide here) and turning on Smart Animations.

Troubleshooting TPS Lag

Please see the Server Setup guide for Troubleshooting Lag. The same tips also apply to a single-player world. Both the built-in debug profiler provided by Mojang and the Spark mod can help you track down sources of lag in your world. Having a report generated by Spark will help substantially if you are seeking support on Discord as our support team will typically be able to identify the cause from it.

Before trying to track down TPS issues, please ensure that you have pregenerated chunks. It is normal for TPS to drop substantially during chunk generation if you have not done this.

The most common cause of low TPS is mob AI, and the most common cause of that is caves full of zombies holding items. Zombies that have an item in their hand don't count towards the mob cap and don't despawn, so can often pile-up underground without a player noticing.

The next most common cause is a high number of chunks loaded. This can be caused by chunk loaders, a high number of players being online (if in multi-player), or a high render-distance.

OptiFine

Some (but not all) users will see performance benefits from installing OptiFine (see the OptiFine guide here). In general, we've found that OptiFine reduces CPU usage but increases RAM usage and pack loading times - please be patient - it typically takes several minutes longer for the pack to load if using OptiFine (and is normal to see a "Not Responding" popup during this time - please wait it out rather than closing the game).

Performance Mods

Our packs already include the performance mods that we consider to be stable enough for most users (excluding OptiFine, which we can't include alongside the pack due to their licensing / copyright). However, there are some mods around that can aid with performance in some situations.

For all packs, the Dynamic View mod may help if you are running a server. It is only needed server-side, your players do not also need the mod. Dynamic View causes the number of chunks around each player to expand or shrink depending on the current load on the server, so if a server is lagging it will load fewer chunks and if it is running well it will load more.

For our 1.15.2 packs, you might consider using the Forge version of Lithium, but please use caution - it is entirely unsupported, and may require adjusting the config of Performant to prevent incompatible overlap. Lithium can be used on a server without the players also having the mod. It does give performance gains in some cases, but please make a backup of your world first.

JVM Flags

You should only adjust these if you are familiar with JVM arguments and Minecraft mod packs. These parameters improve the way Java handles memory (specifically garbage collection) and are selected with Minecraft specifically in mind. Note that these arguments do not include the Xms and Xms settings, which are usually included by the launcher you are using, but not always. You may need to add those as well.

Please refer to this excellent guide by Aikar, which includes highly optimised JVM parameters, and explains it far better than we could. These are designed with servers in mind, but should still work reasonably well for clients too.