Gaming Minecraft problem

[R4Liam]

As some of you may know i recently managed to get my nvidia driver working properly on windows 7. However, when i try and play minecraft, it runs and puts me into the game but it is reaaallly laggy and i mean really. it's worse than black ops honestly!

but seriously, i opened the task manager to see what was up and i noticed that the physical memory was at 96% which is ridiculous but this is when i'm not playing minecraft, when i'm trying to play minecraft the memory goes up more! it most likely dangerous to have the memory so high isn't it? so what i'm asking is, is there a way of reducing the memory usage to play minecraft without the lag because on xp it was not laggy at all.

 

[Rydian]

That's a common misunderstanding when it comes to Vista/7.

Yeah, Vista will often use much more memory than Xp, and not only because it has a larger footprint.

Coding Horror has a good article ( http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/000688.html ) on the subject.

Windows Xp didn't make very good use of memory for caching, while vista does alot more caching, which in theory should allow programs to start faster. If it needs more available memory for an active program it will shuffle things around. Vista just makes sure none of your ram is being wasted.

psychic stalkerWe don't need to rehash this. We've been over it eighty goddamn times this year and I'm sick of it repeatedly coming up.

Vista doesn't "use more resources." It takes advantage of otherwise-unused resources, the way every other OS besides Windows has been doing for decades. Vista doesn't "use more memory," it allows system caching to use more available memory resources, which gets instantly evicted when more free memory is required; which other operating systems have been doing for decades - it's called a "cache." Vista doesn't "waste video resources," it takes advantage of 3D hardware that for the last several years has otherwise gone completely unused. The redesigned sound and video driver subsystems is a long-overdue overhaul that should have been done in XP. The new UAC protection is also long overdue, and is something that every other OS has been doing for decades.

And this is a good thing.

Please stop making mountains of mole-hills.

The problem lies elsewhere. Show us screenshots of the task manager when minecraft is running, both the Processes and Performance tabs.

 

[Sausage Head]

Close any unused applications; set priority to High and affinity to 1 if you have a multi-core processor.
Press F3 in-game and tell what you see there.

 

[twiztidsinz]

but seriously, i opened the task manager to see what was up and i noticed that the physical memory was at 96% which is ridiculous but this is when i'm not playing minecraft,Then there's some app that is running and using WAY too much memory.
Open Task Manager and sort the list by Memory (click the Memory column to sort by amount used) and see what is using all your RAM.
You've possibly got a dead program that crashed and didn't give up it's memory, or something that closed but didn't actually close and is sucking up memory (MediaMonkey use to do that during the beta, you'd close it and it would start to use more and more RAM and CPU til it maxed both out).

QUOTE(R4Liam @ Feb 18 2011, 07:51 AM) when i'm trying to play minecraft the memory goes up more! it most likely dangerous to have the memory so high isn't it?

Kind of like saying "Is it dangerous to fill a box?". No, it's not dangerous.
It might cause some issues (apps will need to use Virtual Memory -hard drive space, which is slower- or wait for another app to free up memory), but it's not dangerous.

 

[R4Liam]

well i'll add that i recently installed this windows 7 over windows xp so maybe windows xp is still running stuff underneath? anyway here are screenshots of the task manager:

i know firefox is running but the system should be able to cope with one major program at least. maybe my computer cannot cope with windows 7 as an operating system--it may have only been built for xp?

 

[Sausage Head]

Are multiple accounts running? If so, leave only one opened.

 

[Joe88]

it looks like you only have 512MB which it not good

and XP cant be running stuff underneath it as it has been removed

 

[twiztidsinz]

The problem is, your system only has (or only detects) 512MB RAM.

If you know the system has more than 512MB RAM I would look up how to replace the RAM on your laptop (You've got the battery bars, so I'm making a guess) and ensure that they're installed properly and didn't come loose.

If you only have 512MB, I'd look into buying a couple GBs -- I'd suggest 2~4, but a minimum of 1.
Depending on how many slots you have/have available, you could possibly save the 512MB and fill the remaining slots with 1GB Sticks.

 

[I am r4ymond]

I somewhat have a similar problem when playing the Beta version of Minecraft.

The last time I played the Beta version of Minecraft was a few months ago, and it was lagging more than I expected it to lag. Does Minecraft require a high-quality video card or what? All I have is an integrated graphics card, I think (NVIDIA GeForce 6150SE nForce 430), 3GB of RAM, and an AMD Athlon Dual Core 4450e processor. Is is my computer or is it the Beta version's fault that Minecraft is lagging?

I'm running on Windows 7 Ultimate if that helps.

 

[twiztidsinz]

I somewhat have a similar problem when playing the Beta version of Minecraft.

The last time I played the Beta version of Minecraft was a few months ago, and it was lagging more than I expected it to lag. Does Minecraft require a high-quality video card or what? All I have is an integrated graphics card, I think (NVIDIA GeForce 6150SE nForce 430), 3GB of RAM, and an AMD Athlon Dual Core 4450e processor. Is is my computer or is it the Beta version's fault that Minecraft is lagging?

I'm running on Windows 7 Ultimate if that helps.

I think Minecraft needs a lot of video RAM.
And a powerful GPU would help as it's rendering a lot of blocks.

 

[Joe88]

gfx card is also a huge factor

poorly coded makes it a resource hog and requires high end stuff to run it properly

 

[I am r4ymond]

I somewhat have a similar problem when playing the Beta version of Minecraft.

The last time I played the Beta version of Minecraft was a few months ago, and it was lagging more than I expected it to lag. Does Minecraft require a high-quality video card or what? All I have is an integrated graphics card, I think (NVIDIA GeForce 6150SE nForce 430), 3GB of RAM, and an AMD Athlon Dual Core 4450e processor. Is is my computer or is it the Beta version's fault that Minecraft is lagging?

I'm running on Windows 7 Ultimate if that helps.

I think Minecraft needs a lot of video RAM.
And a powerful GPU would help as it's rendering a lot of blocks.

Well, according to the System Information, the 'Adapter RAM' has 128 MB. I guess that's not enough.

 

[Tomothy]

Video cards don't matter much in minecraft. Minecraft mostly stresses the cpu and ram over anything else.

 

[R4Liam]

The problem is, your system only has (or only detects) 512MB RAM.

If you know the system has more than 512MB RAM I would look up how to replace the RAM on your laptop (You've got the battery bars, so I'm making a guess) and ensure that they're installed properly and didn't come loose.

If you only have 512MB, I'd look into buying a couple GBs -- I'd suggest 2~4, but a minimum of 1.
Depending on how many slots you have/have available, you could possibly save the 512MB and fill the remaining slots with 1GB Sticks.

It isn't a laptop (the bars on bottom right is the internet signal).

I'm sure my computer has more RAM than 500mb because it used to run minecraft and various other programs at the same time on xp prior to switching to windows 7 and ran fine.

Is there a way of identifying the RAM of my computer through a pragram to show you guys a screenshot?

 

[Rydian]

Right-click "computer" in the start menu and go to the properties.

 

[Rafinesque]

If you install one Windows operating system over another for an upgrade, instead of formatting and installing clean, you can expect problems.

Also, 512 MB is not enough to run Windows 7. Not even close. Windows 7 needs 2 GB to run smoothly, and 4 GB if you want to run multiple programs, or have a lot of tabs open in a browser.

 

[YayMii]

(accidentally erased what I was going to say, so here's a short summary)
1. Get more RAM. You need way more RAM.
2. Getting a better GPU won't help very much.
3. Minecraft doesn't use multiple CPU cores.
4. The Optimine mod does wonders. Try it. (on my PC, Minecraft was barely playable, but with the mod I get up to 130 FPS on lowest settings, and 40-60FPS on far/fancy)

5. If you have the time, build a tall tower of sand, stand on top, and look out. Set the view distance to Far, then hit F3. Wait until the chunk updates go to 0 (might take a while). Turn around, and wait for the chunk updates to stop again. Then go back down (you can press F3 again now). Switch your view distance back, and then play.
What this does is allows the game to chunk update by itself, preventing it from chunk updating while you're playing (since they're the main reason for lag). This method is probably less effective with Optimine since Optimine already optimizes the chunk updates (but it still would probably help).

 

[Rafinesque]

Thanks for the tip on optimine. I haven't heard of that before your post (although I don't have too many performance problems with Minecraft)