RAM and Minecraft

THE INTRO

It has been long debated that allocating more RAM to Minecraft will boost your FPS. Well, not really. Despite overwhelming evidence against it, people keep claiming that Minecraft with 8GB of RAM will run better than Minecraft with 1GB RAM. So, with this blog, I intend to add to the massive heap of evidence suggesting that above a certain amount of memory, Minecraft's performance will not change.



THE SETUP

I used my computer to run these tests, and the specs are below.

• Intel Core i7-5820K
  
• Nvidia GTX 980
  
• 32GB Corsair DDR4-2400MHz RAM
  
• 1TB Crucial BX100 SSD + 1TB WD Blue HDD
  

For this test, I generated a normal singleplayer world in vanilla Minecraft 1.8.8. I walked around letting chunks generate, and pointed the camera at a hill with some sheep on it. I then started Minecraft with various amounts of RAM, ranging from 64MB all the way to 24GB and recorded the framerate. Other than the 16-chunk render distance, all settings are maxed out.


THE RESULTS

64MB:

• Game would not launch.
  

128MB:

• Game launched, but ran out of memory while loading the world.
  

256MB:

• 1 FPS. Game ran out of memory when trying to take a screenshot.
  

512MB:




1GB:




2GB:




4GB:




8GB:




16GB:




24GB:




As you can see, Minecraft's performance does not increase with more than 512MB of memory.


THE CONCLUSION

Does this mean you should run Minecraft with only 512MB of memory? No. Part of your world may have a memory leak or you may raise a massive animal farm, potentially causing memory usage to go above 512MB. Does this mean modpacks don't need a lot of memory? No. Many modpacks require more memory than Minecraft gives itself by default due to unoptimized code and other factors.

What this does mean, though, is that Minecraft's performance does not scale with the amount of memory you give it. Just give it what it needs, and it as well as the rest of your computer will run happily.