FTB / modded Minecraft runs poorly on new enthusiast rig

[MachineMedic]

Hey there,

I figured I'd post this little head scratcher here for anyone that might have dealt with a similar experience.

About two weeks ago, I finally put together my new dream PC that has been in the works for quite a long time. So far, I've ironed out most of the hardware and software kinks (aside from those pertaining to Windows 10), and am enjoying the build immensely.

However, I have so far been unable to convince my Nvidia drivers to recognize Java programs like Minecraft as high-performance applications that require the use of the system GPU.

Apparently, this has been a known issue with both Nvidia and AMD drivers for many years, but neither company has really put forth more than a half-arsed effort at fixing it from what I can tell. The generally recognized solution amongst the Minecraft community seems to be to set a custom performance profile for Javaw.exe in the Nvidia control panel. This method seems to be hit-or-miss at best, and so far has done nothing for me.

My build is in no way lacking horsepower in any area, and I can plainly tell that the GPU is not running because the GPU thermals don't change from idle temps whenever MC is running like they would with any other game.

Framerates are slightly better on my new machine (15-25) than on my old craptop (10-15), and are frequently interspersed with lots of high latency frames (3-6 per second on average).

My modpack of choice is The Dark Trilogy 1.1.1, which contains somewhere just shy of about 200 mods if I recall correctly.

Build list;

• 
  CPU: Intel i7 5820k
  MOBO: ASRock X99 OC Formula
  Cooler: Noctua NH-D15S
  RAM: Corsair 4x8GB 2133MHz DDR4 kit W/XMP
  GPU: MSI 980 Ti Lightning
  Storage: Samsung SSD 950 512GB, Western Digital Blue 1TB/7200
  PSU: Corsair HX850i
  OS: Windows 10 W/plans to dual boot Linux Mint 17.

If anyone has any ideas as to how to 'trick' the Nvidia drivers into high gear whenever Java is running, or any other ideas, I would appreciate the help.

NOTICE: This is an X99 build with a Haswell-E processor - there is no integrated graphics system on this chip, and no video output connection on the motherboard. Switchable graphics tricks will not work here.

 

[newtekie1]

It has been a good long while since I played minecraft, but I remember it being very CPU limited. Even more so with mods like FTB. One of the main issues, IIRC, was that it ran on a single thread, so it only uses one CPU core. If that is still the case, then your i7 5820k isn't going to perform much better than an i3. Your GPU is not getting warm because it isn't being loaded, because the GPU has to wait on the CPU. Start overclocking your CPU and I bet your framerates will go up.

 

[MachineMedic]

Yeah, that would make sense - My old CPU was an i5 clocked at about 2.4GHz, and I'm running my new 5820k at stock frequencies for now (3.3GHz).

That corresponds roughly to the increase in framerate that I've noticed between the two.

If this is a single-thread cpu bottleneck, then there is nothing I can really do about this situation short of overclocking, can I? Does the dedicated MC server software utilize more cores?

 

[newtekie1]

I don't think a dedicated server would help. The server already runs in the background anyway using one of your cores, and the main game uses another core. But the problem is the main game portion is very CPU bottlenecked. The only option really is to overclock.

 

[MachineMedic]

That's a damn shame. Even if I upped my cores to 4.0-4.4GHz, I would still probably only see framerates of 20-30, and those would probably still be pretty jittery at best.

It is unfortunate how all the processing power in the world can be negated by poor software design. I've had similar processor bottle necking in Guild Wars 2 and Fallout 4 to much lesser degrees (45-55FPS min, 35-45FPS min respectively) in poorly optimized maps and areas. Yet I can run Crysis 3, etc. between 80 and 170 FPS about 95% of the time on ultra settings.