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Comment by ctkrohn | Hacker News Reader

"Perrson cites games such as Dwarf Fortress, Dungeon Keeper and Inifiniminer among key influences on Minecraft's anything-goes nature and blocky 8-bit style."

Blocky 8-bit style? Those graphics would have been cutting edge in 1993, almost a decade after the heyday of 8-bit systems.

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Additionally, they are cutting edge now. The textures are so small for budget and performance reasons. When generating new terrain, my i7 920 system with a HD 4850 drops to 40 fps. You can download higher-resolution third-party textures, and they turn the game into a slideshow.

That may be more to do with the Minecraft running in Java and not making full use of the GPU.

There's no reason that graphics of Minecraft's quality shouldn't be blazingly fast on current hardware.

Hmm I'm not sure. Look at World of Warcraft, it looks OK-ish (by today's standards) but mostly because of the great texturing; poly count is way low. The reason is that the world is just do damn big, and I suspect it's the same with Minecraft. Even with advanced LOD algorithms, the open-ended world concept requires so many polygons to render that today's hardware is simply not sufficient to render it. Processoers and GPUs need to improve 10-fold in performance, and games like these will still easily use all that power. (by that time it may be more efficient to just raytrace them, especially as we'll have dozens of cores in a few years...)

Also, I suspect the Java and GPU points are moot, as I cannot image it doesn't use OpenGL. Now the Jave OpenGL implementation or intermediary or whatever may not be as fast as 'native' calls but I think it's not going to make a magnitude difference.

TL/DR: IMO it's not about the graphics quality but about the sheer amount of it.

"Even with advanced LOD algorithms, the open-ended world concept requires so many polygons to render that today's hardware is simply not sufficient to render it"

What? It's been awhile but ~ 5 yrs ago I remember implementing a quadtree LOD algorithm that pretty much allowed me to make the world as big as I wanted considering only the area nearby would be rendered. If its out of view, its a flat world.

"considering only the area nearby would be rendered"

Well yeah if you make the area around you small enough, then sure.

Taking WoW as an example again (because it's what I'm familiar with), decreasing the view distance is the single most influential parameter to improve performance. When you fly across a landscape and mountains pop up out of nowhere as you approach them, in triangles, it very much takes away from the realism.

Of course this is not just about rendering triangles any more, LOD is constrained by the CPU and memory, but more raw poly pushing power would lessen the burden on the CPU...

(experience drawn on a NVidia 9800 video card, not top of the line but a rather average casual gamer card I'd say)

I like how you apparently came to that conclusion based on the language it was implemented in, and without any knowledge of its internal structure.

I just fired it up with the ATI Catalyst panel open, and it said a maximum of 53% GPU utilization. Which isn't bad, since Minecraft wouldn't be using any of the shader units.

Well, presumably, since I know as little as you do about how Minecraft is designed.

The rendering engine is pretty primitive by modern standards, and shows signs of being implemented by someone new to OpenGL. It displays all the performance issues that a typical first OpenGL implementation does like significant lag when turning around quickly where objects are swapped in and out of memory in a blocking manner.

It could benefit from significant optimizations in terms of algorithm and these would probably make it perform an order of magnitude even faster than porting the same code to C++ would ever do.

The OpenGL layer is not being utilized effectively. I think the game is currently CPU/VM bound and simply can't keep up with the GPU.

More aggressive use of the GPU, like through OpenGL or OpenCL calls, would improve performance considerably. I'm not sure how viable the OpenCL angle is on Java, though.

Java can make full use of the GPU. The game uses LWJGL, a wrapper for OpenGL and other native/accelerated libraries. You can even use shader programs from Java.

It's a style, not a technology anymore ;)

I suppose if you average Dungeon Keepers graphics with Dwarf Fortress's stock ASCII set, you'd get something close to 8-bit styling.

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