Graphics

This setting is identical to vanilla Minecraft. “Fancy” is more resource intensive; it turns on shadow rendering, dynamic water, volumetric clouds, and transparent leaves, among other things. Switch to “Fast” to disable the effects and increase FPS.

Smooth Lighting

This setting is identical to vanilla Minecraft. It has a very minimal effect on performance; we suggest leaving it on because toggling it to the lower settings is pretty ugly (and you gain very little FPS boost in return).

Smooth LightingLevel

This setting is introduced by Optifine and allows you a finer level of control over how the Smooth Lighting is applied. Again, the performance boost here is minimal so only decrease the percentage if you’re looking to squeeze out an FPS boost on a very low-spec machine.

GUI Scale

Adjusts the onscreen display (e.g. quick access bar and health/hunger). If you’re playing on a very large monitor and find the GUI to be too small, you can fix it here.

Brightness

No effect on performance, simply a gamma-style adjustment of in-game light levels. Moody makes caves very dark whereas full brightness allows you to see without torches.

Fog

Optifine only. Allows you to adjust the fog render quality as Fancy, Fast, or Off. Has a marginal impact on performance.

Fog Start

Optifine only. Whereas toggling the state of the fog will actually have a small impact on performance, adjusting the Fog Start (how near or far the fog from the player the fog begins) distance is a cosmetic change like adjusting the brightness. If you want to make the game more difficult and more moody, adjust the fog closer so you see less of the world around you.

3D Anaglyph

Found in vanilla Minecraft. For use with traditional red-blue 3D glasses.

Render Distance

This setting is an enhanced version of the one in vanilla Minecraft. Setting indicates how far the Minecraft engine renders the game, in chunks, from the player’s current position. In vanilla Minecraft your render distance maxes at 16 chunks. With Optifine you can max it out at 32. Lowering this number increases FPS.

Max Framerate

This section is actually a bit counterintuitive. Your computer cannot display a frame rather higher than the refresh rate of monitor so limiting it to the refresh rate of your monitor (30, 60, or 120hz) is recommended. Some users, however, do report better results with Optifine by setting their framerate to Max.

View Bobbing

When on, the players head bobs slightly while walking; when off, the view is stable.

Advanced OpenGL

Only works on machines with GPUs that support OpenGL 2.0+; helps increase FPS by only rendering what is visible to the player. There’s no risk in turning it on (if you don’t have the right GPU, nothing will happen).

Clouds

Turning the clouds off offers a very minor increase in performance.

Clouds

Fast clouds are 2D and have no depth if you fly up and look at them. Fancy clouds are 3D. You can also turn the clouds off.

Trees

Fancy trees have transparent leaves you can look through; Fast trees have opaque leaf blocks that transmit no light.

Water

Fancy water undergoes multiple passes to erase any artifacts, Fast water renders faster but will have some visual artifacts.

Sky

Turning the sky off decreases GPU load. The sun and moon are toggled independently and will stay in the sky unless turned off in the next setting.

Sun & Moon

Toggles visibility of the sun and moon; offers small performance boost. The sun/moon movement on the in-game clock will continue to work even though the sun and moon are no longer visible in the sky.

Depth Fog

This setting is distinct from the Fog setting in the general menu. This setting governs how the fog found close to the bedrock functions. The adjustment is cosmetic and allows you to make the bedrock fog denser or have it behave just like fog at regular elevations

Translucent Blocks

This setting governs whether or not translucent blocks will be rendered in a detailed or undetailed fashion. Set to fancy, blocks will take on the coloration of other blocks they are stacked with. Set to Fast, fewer resources will be used to render the color tints.

Cloud Height

Purely cosmetic. If you build a castle on top of a tall mountain and you’re sick of the clouds drifting right through your courtyard you can use this setting to raise the cloud ceiling.

Grass

Fast grass uses the default grass texture. Fancy grass uses, if available, biome specific textures. Marginal performance boost on Fast as a single texture is used for all grass.

Rain & Snow

Fancy offers very dense rain and snowfall. Fast thins the rain/snow fall. Off removes the precipitation altogether. Performance gain is marginal.

Stars

On/Off. Removing the stars offers a marginal performance gain.

Show Capes

On/Off. Removing capes offers a marginal performance gain.

Held ItemTool Tips

On/Off. Toggles the “tool tips” when you hold an item in your hand. Basic items simply have a name (like “Clock”), some items in mods actually have a tip here. Change is purely cosmetic.

Dropped Items

Renders dropped items in 3D (Fancy) or 2D (Fast). Fast offers a marginal performance gain.

Mimap Levels

Higher levels offer higher texture smoothing; decreasing Mipmap level can increase performance but at the cost of uglier textures; typically not worth the tradeoff as the performance increase is very small.

Mimap Type

Nearest (offers rough smoothing)/Linear (offers finer smoothing). Again, mostly cosmetic.

AnisotropicFiltering

Works with the Mipmap system and restores detailing (especially on surfaces viewed at a distance or at an angle); turning off the AF can increase performance.

Custom Sky

On/Off. Some texture packs include custom sky textures that can be resource intensive. If you suspect the custom sky in a texture pack you’re using is taxing your system, toggle it off here.

Clear Water

On/Off. When set Off, water is nearly opaque. When turned on, water is more translucent and you can see deeper into it. Turning Clear Water offers a marginal performance boost.

Random Mobs

On/Off. Only applicable to texture packs with multiple mob textures for each in-game mob. If you’re using such a texture pack and you want to limit the texture back to using the primary texture for each mob type instead of chewing up memory loading extra textures, turn this setting off to boost performance.

Better Grass

Set this Off to use simple texture rendering to Fast for full textures, and Fancy for dynamic textures. Set it Off for maximum performance boost.

Better Snow

On/Off. Turning this setting on decreases performance but renders snowfall more realistically.

Custom Fonts

On/Off. Toggles custom resource-pack supplied fonts. Largely cosmetic, we advise against turning it off simply because so many resource packs have such great and thematic font packs included.

Custom Colors

On/Off. Same as the fonts; toggles the custom resource-pack supplied color schemes.

Swamp Colors

On/Off. Toggling this off requires the game to load fewer textures. Swamp textures will be the same as other biomes and grass and vine colors will not be unique to the Swamp biome. Very marginal performance gain.

Smooth Biomes

On/Off. Toggles the biome smoothing. With it on the game does more intense sampling and blends the colors between the edges of biomes; with it off the line between biomes is blocky. Moderate performance gain by toggling it off.

Connected Textures

Fast/Fancy/Off. Toggles the rendering of connected textures (such as bookcases) and whether or not multiple units of the same texture will appear as one larger unit or multiple discrete units. Minimal performance gain by toggling off; game looks much better if left on.

Natural Textures

On/Off. If supported by the resource pack, this setting will randomly rotate textures to create a more natural appearance (such that the game doesn’t appear to have the same repeating stamped texture on large expanses of identical block types). Toggling on does slightly decrease performance but really improves the look of large spans of identical blocks.

Smooth FPS

On/Off. Whether or not this helps you is highly depending on your GPU and drivers. Under ideal circumstances it significantly stabilizes your FPS to reduce judder; if your GPU doesn’t support it, you’ll see no improvement.

Smooth World

On/Off. Only affects play on a local world. It smooths the way the internal server loads the world by distributing tasks more efficiently.

Load Far

On/Off. When on the game will load all the chunks up to the distance you set with the Render Distance option. When “Off’” it will load all the chunks out to the Far distance. We recommend you leave this off as it will enforce whatever setting you opted for in the Render Distance section

Preloaded Chunks

Off/2/4/6/8. Defines how far you need to travel before new chunks are loaded. The performance issues here are a bit of a catch-22 situation.Left “Off” the game will load new chunks for every 5 blocks you travel in the game (although this creates a higher immediate loading demand it also distributes the demand in small chunks across time). For each increase in the number (2/4/8) the amount of chunks loaded increases and the amount traveled before new chunks are loaded also increases. This significantly increases the load strain at any given load interval but, for computers with a lot of memory and GPU power, it means more of the game is loaded and play within the large loaded set of chunks is smoother. Leave “Off” if you’re concerned about lag on a lower end machine.

Chunk Updates

1/2/3/4/5. The default is 1. The lower the number the slower the world will load (because there will be fewer chunk updates) but the more stable the FPS will be in the region of the world you currently occupy.

Dynamic Updates

On/Off. Default is “Off”; will only update chunks as the player is moving. Toggle this setting “On” to enable nearby chunks to update while the player is standing still (thus loading the world faster).

Fast Math

On/Off. Offloads some of the rendering functions to the CPU. While results here are highly hardware dependent, if you have a weaker GPU definitely experiment with turning this setting on to lean on the power of your CPU.

Lazy Chunk Loading

On/Off. Like Smooth World, Lazy Chunk Loading helps smooth chunk updating and rendering for local worlds. It’s turned on by default and boosts performance; if your world is rendering strangely toggle it off.

Fast Render

On/Off. Uses CPU to increase render times. If you notice flickering textures or strangely rendered shadows, toggle this setting off.

Lagometer

On/Off. This setting toggles on a visual meter located in the lower left corner of the screen between the edge and the on-screen item toolbar. Like a combination heartbeat and GPU monitor, it moves slowly across the screen offering a visual representation of current GPU loads, chunk loading, and other metrics. Useful for on-the-fly diagnosis while playing but, like any GUI element, turning it on creates a new resource demand.

Debug Profilers

Renders dropped items in 3D (Fancy) or 2D (Fast). Fast offers a marginal performance gain.

Weather

On/Off. As the name suggests, toggles the weather on and off. Only works on local worlds.

Time

Default/Night/Day. Allows you to, in a local Creative Mode game, set the time permanently day or night.

Fullscreen

Switches the game between fullscreen and windowed mode (like the F11 button does during game play).

Fullscreen Mode

Default/[Available Resolutions]. Allows you to set your fullscreen mode to the monitor’s default resolution or other supported resolutions. Lowering the resolution can improve game performance but it also makes switching in and out of the game to the desktop environment much slower.

Autosave

2s/20s/3m/30m. The game default is to save your world every 2 seconds. On many machines, both high end and low end, this can cause significant bouts of lag. Optifine shifts the save schedule to every 3 minutes but you can push it as high as 30 minutes. We recommend leaving at the Optifine default of 3 minutes.