Minecraft for Windows 10 or Minecraft Bedrock Edition was developed to be a performant, modern, multi-platform version of the original 2011 Minecraft Java Edition. Minecraft RTX is a feature set built into Minecraft for Windows 10, and both with and without ray-tracing, Minecraft for Windows 10 won't always run great out-of-the-box. In this article, we'll explain what you need to know about Minecraft for Windows 10 to get the performance you want out of the game.
Windows 10 Minecraft Performance: What to Know
First off, there are a number of strange quirks unique to Minecraft for Windows 10. For example, you can't change the resolution of Windows 10 Minecraft. That is to say there is no in-game setting for resolution. Minecraft will, on PC at least, simply default to using whatever your desktop resolution is, so if you change your desktop resolution, you can change your resolution in Minecraft.
Vertical sync is another non-setting in Minecraft for Windows 10. There is no in-game way to disable vertical sync, and by default, vertical sync is enabled in Minecraft for Windows 10. You can change this by forcing a certain method of vertical sync (or turning it off altogether) through your graphics card's own software.
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If you use Resource Packs, Minecraft for Windows 10's version of mods you can simply download and install with a couple of clicks, some of these can give you additional graphics settings to toggle on and off, like vertical sync, but the vanilla game won't have that.
Minecraft, whether it's the Java Edition or Minecraft for Windows 10, has some unique performance characteristics you need to keep in mind. Many will look at Minecraft's simple blocky aesthetic and assume that any modern hardware must be able to run it perfectly.
This is true to the extent that mobile phones, low-end PCs, and old consoles like PS3 and Xbox 360 can and do run Minecraft. However, Minecraft is a lot more like a simulation game like Cities: Skylines than it is a traditional game like Assassin's Creed when it comes to performance.
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This means that in a game like Assassin's Creed if you load into a certain location with certain graphical settings, depending on the time of day and how many enemies are onscreen, you'll get the same performance you'll always get in that area. This can fluctuate, sure, but you won't eventually return to the same area and get significantly worse performance.
A game like Cities: Skylines doesn't work like this. If you boot up Skylines, whack up all the graphics settings to max, and load into a new city, you'll get nigh-infinite FPS, but if you build even a medium-sized city and zoom in, your FPS will drastically decrease. By the time you get into huge megacities, regardless of platform or hardware, FPS will be low.
Minecraft is like this. If you boot up a new world, whack all the settings to their highest values, and load in, you'll have a nice, smooth experience, most of the time, especially on Minecraft for Windows 10 which allows you to maintain stable framerates at significantly higher render distances than Java.
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However, if you spend countless hours building up a massive base, a villager trading hall, an automatic item sorter, and all kinds of fun projects, the same location that once ran perfectly can start to chug. To some extent, this can be managed, but lower FPS is an inevitable fact of life in Minecraft, too.
Cutting down on in-game lag can be done in various ways. Limit torch spam to limit light sources the game has to render. Turn off farms you aren't using. Make sure you don't spawn tons and tons of entities in farms by your main base. And remember, playing online generally means worse performance than playing offline.
Minecraft RTX Performance: What to Know
Remember, Minecraft RTX isn't its 'own thing' and is instead a feature of Minecraft for Windows 10. it's something that, if you have a supported NVIDIA GPU, you can simply enable in Minecraft's settings, but actually using the feature is a little more complicated than that.
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Minecraft ray-tracing isn't like other graphics settings you can just switch on and off, it's instead a toggleable feature you can use when you have ray-tracing-enabled Resource Packs installed and activated. So, you'll have to find your choice of ray-tracing resource pack, which you can find online across many different sites, before you can actually enable ray-tracing.
This means that different Resource Packs will have different performance impacts, so if you notice particularly bad performance with a certain Resource Pack, it might be the pack and not your setup. Resource Packs can also have weird conflicts with one another, so you'll have to play around with them to find the best blend of stability, performance, and fidelity.
RTX functionality in Minecraft isn't limited to just ray-tracing, though, as you can also enable DLSS in Minecraft for Windows 10. However, you can't enable DLSS in Minecraft without ray-tracing also be enabled, whether or not you have an RTX GPU. This means you can't get the massive performance increase of DLSS without the massive performance hit of ray-tracing.
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Maximum render distance is also limited when RTX features are enabled, and you'll want to set it far below the lower-maximum anyways, becasue of how graphically intensive Minecraft's suite of ray-tracing effects actually are.
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