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Video card for Minecraft?

StinkyPinky

StinkyPinky

Diamond Member
My son likes Minecraft and plays in on his Ipad, but he wants the PC version as it has features the pocket edition lacks.

I googled the specs and was pretty surprised at how high they are for a game that looks like it was made in 1995.

Are there any players here? What would be a good video card to max the game out at 1440 x 900 resolution? Apparently the game has HD texture packs as well, are they recommended?
 
Yeah I saw that but it's pretty vague. I would like him to be able play it at 60fps. Thanks anyway

I forgot to mention it's a sandy bridge pentium CPU and limited to a 300W PSU (although a good quality one)
 
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Honestly for minecraft video cards are not that big like other games as long as you have the ram and cpu needed for the game more then anything if I recall.

I can't speak up about a lot of the mods out there like the HD texture packs you talked about as there are a ton and can vary huge to the point of adding 10x what the game offers normally easily.

Any decent $125+ video card would be enough for that game but if you want to add other games you may want to pump it up a bit just to be sure.
 
You'll need a decent video card if you start using Shaders or Texture packs. I have tried both myself and though they look great, I kinda prefer the vanilla textures.

For vanilla use, it doesn't really take much of a video card to play. My 5870 and bros 7750 both work fine. Seems to be a CPU bound game.
 
4-way Custom WC/OC Titan Black, Hex Raid 1TB SSDs, 96GB DDR3-3000, Nitrogen cooled 4960, and 4 bezel-less UP3214Q displays for a 64" 7680x4320 big screen. Finish it off with a McIntosh Reference Home Theatre setup (this system is only $200k for the HT stuff!).
 
Arkaign said:
4-way Custom WC/OC Titan Black, Hex Raid 1TB SSDs, 96GB DDR3-3000, Nitrogen cooled 4960, and 4 bezel-less UP3214Q displays for a 64" 7680x4320 big screen. Finish it off with a McIntosh Reference Home Theatre setup (this system is only $200k for the HT stuff!).
Click to expand...

That's fine if he only plans to run it with medium settings. Gonna need some heavy overclocking if he wants to start adding some texture packs.
 
From my experience (I have only used the default textures), GPU is not really an issue, but even a high end system can grind to a halt if things start to happen. Look at some of the youtube clips that use several thousand dynamite blocks going off and those systems hang.

Ram and CPU are the main items, though by the sounds of it, not something you have the option to change.
 
Arkaign said:
4-way Custom WC/OC Titan Black, Hex Raid 1TB SSDs, 96GB DDR3-3000, Nitrogen cooled 4960, and 4 bezel-less UP3214Q displays for a 64" 7680x4320 big screen. Finish it off with a McIntosh Reference Home Theatre setup (this system is only $200k for the HT stuff!).
Click to expand...


Don't listen to this guy. You only need 48GB RAM.
 
StinkyPinky said:
Yeah I saw that but it's pretty vague. I would like him to be able play it at 60fps. Thanks anyway

I forgot to mention it's a sandy bridge pentium CPU and limited to a 300W PSU (although a good quality one)
Click to expand...

300W isn't very much to work with, especially as the 12V rating is unknown. keep the vid card under 200W and cross your fingers.

http://www.anandtech.com/bench/GPU14/838

lots of people initially underestimate the video quality of minecraft. an hd texture pack (resource pack) can make even a mighty pc choke.
 
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I think you'll be very happy with a modern entry-level card, such as a 7750 or GT640. Either should be sufficient for a texture pack of 128x128. Last I checked, Intel iGPUs had relatively lower performance in Minecraft to other games due to driver issues, though this may no longer be the case.

A Sandy Bridge Pentium is highly appropriate for this.

I've tried a lot of texture packs but I keep coming back to Sphax.
 
Thanks for the replies. I think a 640 should be ok for a 300W PSU. The PC has nothing else except a SSD and two sticks of ram.
 
I have used Minecraft quite happily on a GTS 250, radeon 6850, 7750, and GTX 660Ti. At 1080p or higher.

However, the GeForce 9400M sucked, even at 720p.

I wasn't using high res textures though.
 
Minecraft is actually kind of a pig for what it is. You'd think it would run well on everything from Atoms on up but its not a very efficient application.
 
Draw distance is what makes Minecraft such a hog; from what I can tell, there is no level of detail (lod) changes based on distance (like every other game I can think of). If you have draw distance up to max, the game renders everything normally; instead of substituting a 2D sprite of a tree a mile away, the game renders it just like a tree next to you.

So if you crank that setting down, almost any video card would work, but your CPU is pretty bad for a game that really has no optimization, and you are probably running only 2GB (?) of memory.

Buying a good video card for that system would probably not make a huge difference in performance (for Minecraft). I'd hit the for sale/trade forum and try to find a decent older video card for cheap (or try Ebay/etc). I'd also recommend upping your memory capacity (if running 2GB).
 
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