User:RhythmicDaze

Formerly known as Bb 20, now RhythmicDaze as of October 31, 2016.

Description
Guten Tag! When it comes to me, I love tech. Since grade school, I've always been fascinated by computer hardware and software, finding ways to tweak and meddle with that of which could probably be left well alone (in a working state). Fixing computers and game consoles, sometimes other electronics and appliances, is what I love doing; that's my fun! I'm easy to get along with, patient and forgiving, so you'll never have me yelling at you for a wrong edit or an article not being formatted the way I prefer. Respect is above all the most important to me, and you'll always be treated fair by me.

As for my part in the community, I started helping out here in March of 2013. Mainly, I maintain the Hardware performance page. There, I make sure that users can make proper comparisons between their hardware and user-posted results by making sure the information they add is correct and formatted for readability. It's my first for Wiki editing though I hope my contributions go a long way towards benefiting those who come to this Wiki.

I make editing mistakes too. In that case, if you have tips for future editing based on previous edits I have made, please let me know through my talk page, User talk:RhythmicDaze, or through an email.

I hope you found this reading enlightening! Have a great day :)

Pages I look after

 * Hardware_performance
 * Hardware_performance/create
 * Hardware_performance/entries
 * Hardware_performance/intro
 * Hardware_performance/nav
 * Template:HardwareEntry
 * Template:HardwareEntry/doc

Pages of interest

 * Module:Version/Numbers

To Do
Hardware_performance:
 * 1.9.x
 * [X] SSD's must be listed with their capacity.
 * The Samsung 850 EVO 128GB and 256GB models have different transfer speeds as per their capacity. The higher the capacity, the higher the transfer speeds, typically. We don't need this for HDDs or SSHDs.
 * [X] iGPUs/APUs, GPUs and CPUs should list their frequencies when overclocked, but not required when at stock freqs.
 * Not all users list their devices freqs when asked, so we assume they are defaulted anyway. As long as they list the device model then we can gauge the performance from there. (Should also save a considerable amount of page bytes!)
 * [X] Comment lengths may be increased if the above is enacted.
 * Suggested extra words could be up to 'two' for a total of 17 words.
 * [X] Change seed from "Hardware Performance Test" to "forest".
 * I get the feeling that not everyone types it in right when generating a world; not putting in a space, or mistyping.
 * We NEED an area like this where: we have low framerates, and an open area where we can see the framerate rise. A mix of these two in one small area will do us very good.
 * [-] Include a cut-to-the chase tutorial on benchmarking.
 * No mic audio, include only the required steps. Include posting your entry?
 * [X] Recommend setting gamemode to Creative as we don't need to be bothered by any hostile mobs, and we get to the co-ords faster.

Nvidia tweaks for better gameplay performance
I have always been interested in tweaking software to have it work faster for me. Overclocking, Windows registry editing, optimization utilities, ect... Those are the types of things that I like to play around with. This nice thing about the Nvidia Control Panel is that you can have profiles per executable that contain different options for how the graphics drivers work with that program. Here, I will show you some of the effects of these profile options when coupled with javaw.exe.

Currently, I am using Java JRE 8 to do these tests. However, performance is very similar to that of Java SE 7 Update 40. Also, Fraps is being used to collect these figures. The reason for this is that when you have the debuging overlay enabled while in-game, your FPS drops by a good few percent, a lot of times for me it drops by ~100FPS!

NOTE: Each test below was recorded within 120 second period.

Best Settings
Max pre-renderded frames = 4, Power management mode = ON, SLI rendering mode = OFF, Thread optimization = OFF,

These combination of settings above should give the player the best performance overall.

Changing Nvidia Control Panel options is something you will want to look into if you want to squeeze more performance out of your machine. This is great for if you can't immediately upgrade your hardware components, overclock or if your machine can't be upgraded for that matter.

RAM frequency, does it matter?
This series of tests will determine if low RAM frequency, or and overclocked set of DIMMs for that matter, has any bearing on Minecraft's performance.

Curiously, when I hit 1600 and 1866MHz my frame rate went down. Not sure what happened there, though it looks like the sweet spot is 1333MHz for Minecraft.

In the end, and I've seen this before with other benchmarks, when I hit 2133MHz I got the same performance as 1333MHz. This means that beyond this there is likely not benefit to amping up your RAM frequency. Although, it looks like increasing your CPU frequency or multiplier can at least do some good!

Better storage device, or transfer interface, better framerates?
Setting a baseline for these tests, I followed the instructions on the Hardware Performance page to see what frame rate I would receive when using multiple drive configurations over different data interfaces. Here are the results:

SSD (SATA, 6Gb/s):
 * Windowed = 73-119
 * Maximized = 50-93
 * Fullscreen = 62-93

SSHD (SATA, 5400rpm, 6Gb/s):
 * Windowed = 74-125
 * Maximized = 61-97
 * Fullscreen = 63-97

HDD (USB 3.0, 7200rpm):
 * Windowed = 74-119
 * Maximized = 29-94
 * Fullscreen = 63-95

HDD (USB 2.0, 7200rpm):
 * Windowed = 77-121
 * Maximized = 60-96
 * Fullscreen = 53-96

From what I gather, when all chunks within render distance are loaded from storage to RAM, drive I/O will no longer have any effect on the CPU or GPU processing causing low frame rates. Unless you are roaming around in-game, generating or loading chunks, then this simply doesn't seem like much of a performance barrier. So in the end a faster or slow drive will likely not inhibit your playing experience.