To date almost 10,000,000 people have bought Minecraft. With one of the most passionate and active communities behind the game it is no surprise that so many people are jumping on the Minecraft bandwagon.

Needless to say though, with this number of purchases some players have jumped into Minecraft without a computer that is prepared for it. People are fooled into thinking any old computer can run Minecraft thanks to its pixelated style and simple gameplay. As many will testify this couldn’t be further from the truth! Here are some quick and easy tips to improve performance of Minecraft on your computer.

Firstly, whilst it may not be glamorous you are going to want to lower the video settings from the in-game menu. Turning down the Render Distance, turning off Smooth Lighting and changing Graphics from Fancy to Fast will all have a dramatic effect on the way Minecraft runs on your computer. Even turning off the sound in the game’s menu will result make Minecraft run faster.

Whilst in the menu you may have noticed the “Advanced OpenGL” setting. This setting isn’t well understood by many gamers, before looking into it I originally thought that because it had “Advanced” in its title it had to be good and turned it on!

Advanced OpenGL attempts to reduce the load on your graphics card by using more of your processors power to “figure out” what should and should not be rendered. This all sounds a bit boring, but in essence if you have it turned on anything that you’re not looking at won’t be loaded. This is very useful if you are running Minecraft on a laptop, as they typically don’t have very powerful graphics cards. Despite popular belief if you have a more powerful PC it is actually advised that you leave Advanced OpenGL off!

It isn’t particularly attractive playing Minecraft with all the settings turned down. To combat this there is a very popular mod called “Optifine” that is hugely recommended by almost everyone in the Minecraft community. This mod helps smooth out all of the processing and loading of graphics that goes on in the background while you play. This mod is part of the Magic Launcher which is available to download from the Minecraft Forums which makes installation super easy too.

(Link: http://www.minecraftforum.net/topic/939149-launcher-magic-launcher-100-mods-options-news/)

Whilst we’re on the topic of mods you are going to want to uninstall any mods that you don’t feel you need or use. These will be making it harder for your computer to run Minecraft even though you’re not going to be getting any enjoyment out of them. On the whole you are going to want to make Minecraft as easy as possible for your computer to run. Close all the other programs that are running in the background. Yes this even includes your web browser and your music player!