Which version of Minecraft is best for low-end PCs?

Minecraft's two different versions, Java and Bedrock, have always been compared against each other, and for good reason. There are apparent and major, differences between the two. For example, Java has access to mods, while Bedrock uses the Marketplace. One of the biggest differences between Bedrock and Java is how the games run on underpowered machines.

Unfortunately, there's not a straight answer for which version of Mojang's blocky masterpiece is the best for low-end PCs. Each of the two versions has distinct advantages, depending on whether the player wants to mod the game or not. Everything that players need to know about these differences can be found in detail below.

NOTE: Parts of this article are subjective and reflect the writer's opinion.

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Minecraft Bedrock has a better vanilla performance

Bedrock's better performance allows for much higher vanilla render distances. (Image via Mojang)

Bedrock is the version of the game created after Microsoft acquired Mojang. Based on the old Pocket Edition of Minecraft, Bedrock is written in C++. This is a much more optimized language than Java. For all of its uses, Java is a shockingly bad language to code a game in and is the main contributing factor to Java's comparatively awful vanilla performance.

Additionally, Bedrock was always intended to run on multiple platforms, so needing to account for a wide swath of devices and performance levels forced development to focus on optimization in a way that Mojang never needed to for Java.

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Java has a better modded performance

Java, as mentioned previously, has worse vanilla performance. The reasons for this are simple: All of Java is built off of a code base written by one man more than 15 years ago. As new Minecraft updates have been released over the years, the code has slowly but surely become more and more entangled and messy. This has caused the game's overall performance to suffer significantly.

Unlike Bedrock, however, Java has access to Minecraft mods. These are pieces of community-made content that add to or change how the base game works. There are a plethora of mods available to Java players that rewrite the game's rendering engine, optimize how entities and mobs are treated, and more.

When combined effectively, these mods don't only let Java compete with Bedrock's performance, but surpass it. There are also pre-made modpacks available for different Minecraft modloaders designed from the ground up to maximize performance, so players don't even need to hunt down the different mods themselves.

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Ultimately, both versions work completely fine on low-end PCs. However, Bedrock is a better plug-and-play experience, perfect for those who don't want to tinker or fiddle with settings. Java, on the other hand, can be made more optimized than Bedrock, but that does require some legwork, which might be offputting to some.