Advanced OpenGL is a setting in Minecraft that attempts to make Minecraft run faster on your computer. Despite popular belief not all users should have Advanced OpenGL turned on as default.



The setting is designed to reduce the load of low-end graphics cards by "telling it" not to render anything that isn't directly in view of the player. This is known as "occlusion culling".

In return for the reduced work your GPU has to do when Advanced OpenGL is on your processor must do more work in order to figure all of this out.

This is very helpful for users who are playing Minecraft on a laptop or netbook which will typically have worse graphics cards. If your computer has a good graphics card however you probably will not benefit from having Advanced OpenGL on. In fact you may actually get a performance boost from switching it off!

For more information on improving Minecraft performance check out Minecraft Has Run Out of Memory!