How to improve FPS in Minecraft 1.21

The large, sprawling, gorgeous environments that Minecraft has become iconic for over the last 15 years comes at quite a price. The game can be difficult to run, even for incredibly powerful machines. This can lead to low frames per second, or FPS, resulting in choppy gameplay. Thankfully, though, there are a few things that you can do to improve the game's performance.

The best methods for boosting FPS available as of Minecraft 1.21 are detailed below, along with why they are so effective at making the game run better.

Note: Some aspects of this article are subjective and reflect the opinions of the writer

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Tips for improving the FPS of Minecraft 1.21

Lower settings

Lowering the game's video settings is one of the best ways to get extra frames (Image via Mojang)

The easiest and fastest way to increase Minecraft's performance is to fiddle with the in-game settings. There are a few options primarily responsible for performance: render distance, simulation distance, and graphics.

The render distance setting controls how many chunks are generated around players. Simulation distance controls the distance, in chunks, around you that Minecraft mobs and other entities are updated and blocks and fluids are ticked. Decreasing both of these sliders can lead to huge improvements in how smoothly the game plays.

The final setting that has a large impact on performance is the "Graphics" setting. This is a button that you can click on to change whichever graphics profile is selected. The default is fancy, but switching this over to "fast" can cause a significant jump in FPS as it would render the game in a less detailed way.

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Close other programs

Any areas of the game with large amounts of entities are hit particularly hard in terms of performance (Image via Mojang)

Mojang's block masterpiece can be a bit of a resource hog, especially if there are a large number of mobs or entities loaded in. This means that having any other programs open at the same time can cause quite sizeable performance impacts. This is especially noticeable on medium and lower-powered rigs, which already have a hard time running the game at higher render distances.

Closing any background programs that might be running will free up your PC's resources, allowing the game to run better.

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Install a performance texture pack

Bare Bones is a great example of a simple, but gorgeous, texture pack (Image via Mojang)

While it would be a minor boost at best, another way to squeeze a few extra frames out of the game is to install a performance-boosting Minecraft texture pack. These packs focus on simplifying the game's art style, allowing more things to be rendered before performance is impacted.

Installing a new texture pack also gives players a great chance to try out a new art style for the game, which might result in you finding a favorite Minecraft resource pack.

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Install performance mods

While all of the previous methods are useful tips for increasing FPS, installing some of the best Minecraft mods for performance available, such as Sodium, Rubidium, FerriteCore, Starlight, etc., is the best way to make the game run better. These mods literally rewrite portions of the game's code to make them more efficient.

Thankfully, there are preexisting modpacks on both the Modrinth and CurseForge, alternate Minecraft launchers specialized in performance. This makes it super easy to quickly get a bump in gameplay.

Additionally, these mods tend to slot into custom modpacks without stability issues, making them an even better solution. However, since these are mods, this option is only available to Java players.