Hi all, recently I got my partner an older Lenovo laptop (x280) to replace her aging Chromebook. I swapped the windows OS for Linux, and installed MC, hoping to get her into playing with me. She does enjoy playing, but that computer is just too weak to run it without it looking like shit and lagging like crazy. I’d like to get her something else that would be dedicated to playing minecraft, but because it would EXCLUSIVELY be for playing MC, I don’t want to spend a lot of cash. It doesn’t have to be a laptop (I’d expect it to be cheaper to not be one), but I’d like it to be smaller than a full-fledged desktop. Her current x280 has an intel i7 (1.9ghz) and 16GB RAM, so I’m guessing the issue is the video card or lack there of. I’m not looking for minimum specs, so answers from official documentation is pretty hard to apply here. Does anyone have any experience running MC smoothly on something like a NUC or other miniPC?
(we only play multiplayer Java edition on my self hosted server running Paper. No mods yet, but I think eventually Ill get into the mod game.)
I’d recommend not only using sodium but the entire Fabolously Optimised or Simply Optimised modpack (collection of performance mods).
Fabolously Optimised also adds all Optifine features while Simply Optimised only focuses on performance, so I’d generally recommend FO, but SO is available quicker when a new version comes out (since it has to wait for less mods to be updated).
Fabulously Optimized is AWESOME. Whenever my friends ask me how to get better performance or how to get shaders, I’ll tell them to go install the Prism Launcher, log into their Minecraft account, install Fabulously Optimized directly from the launcher itself and additionally ask them what kind of shaders they want so that they could get the right one. Always got positive feedback!