Video Card for Minecraft

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jfnirvana292

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Apr 9, 2002
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I gave my son my old pc a year ago to start playing Minecraft on. He’s outgrew it and I’m looking to upgrade it for him. Motherboard ram cpu and video card. Looking for video card recommendations. The least expensive card that he can enable ray tracing on for minecraft. Thanks!
 
auntjemima said:
If you haven't used raytracing on Minecraft, you'll need a decent card. I would stick to mid to high end. 3070 and up.
Click to expand...

He has an old radeon r7 360. Next question is would it be ok just to uograde the video card?

He has 12gb ram and an amd phenom Ii x6.
 
DooKey said:
That CPU will bottleneck anything but a low-end card for the most part. Give up on raytracing. I'd grab a used RX570 at the most.
Click to expand...

Straight up. Get an 8gb 570 or 580. Super cheap, good addition to the system.

jfnirvana292 said:
He has an old radeon r7 360. Next question is would it be ok just to uograde the video card?

He has 12gb ram and an amd phenom Ii x6.
Click to expand...

Nah, the ram is fine, but the cpu is ollllllllld. You can get an entire i5-6xxx system in one of those HP packages for $100~. I would go that route, personally. That AMD chip is about 4 million years old.
 
mvmiller12 said:
While sys reqs for Minecraft itself are pretty modest, Ray Tracing in Minecraft is built to bring a system to its knees.
Click to expand...
It's the view distance. Turning it all the way up, even without raytracing can be problematic at times.
 
auntjemima said:
Straight up. Get an 8gb 570 or 580. Super cheap, good addition to the system.



Nah, the ram is fine, but the cpu is ollllllllld. You can get an entire i5-6xxx system in one of those HP packages for $100~. I would go that route, personally. That AMD chip is about 4 million years old.
Click to expand...

Will he even notice a new card without ray tracing? It runs ok at 1080p with the setup he has now default settings.
 
NightReaver said:
TIL that rtx is only for bedrock edition, total deal breaker for any interest I had lol.

Maybe a shader mod would be more feasible? Those look pretty great, too.
Click to expand...

So maybe get the upgraded card and install a shader mod to tie him over for the time being lol
 
jfnirvana292 said:
So maybe get the upgraded card and install a shader mod to tie him over for the time being lol
Click to expand...
If all he's looking for is a "wow" graphics upgrade from basic Minecraft, I can vouch that shaders totally do that.

I know they can be pretty gpu intensive depending on how far you want to crank it up, but I can only imagine it's less intensive than rtx.
 
NightReaver said:
If all he's looking for is a "wow" graphics upgrade from basic Minecraft, I can vouch that shaders totally do that.

I know they can be pretty gpu intensive depending on how far you want to crank it up, but I can only imagine it's less intensive than rtx.
Click to expand...
Yep. I had a Skylake i7, 32gb of ram and a gtx1080 and some of the shader kits out there really brought that baby to its knees.
 
NightReaver said:
If all he's looking for is a "wow" graphics upgrade from basic Minecraft, I can vouch that shaders totally do that.

I know they can be pretty gpu intensive depending on how far you want to crank it up, but I can only imagine it's less intensive than rtx.
Click to expand...
Silly question but I search shaders and there’s like 100 different ones. Which one would you recommend?
 
For an example of how ridiculous shaders can get. I have a 5950X and a 3080, at 1440p I only get about 40fps with SEUS HRR PTGI 3.0 (faked ray tracing) shaders.

20230115162217_1.jpg
20230115162123_1.jpg

of course, I move to even a slightly less bombastic shader and it's easily 120fps plus.

Note: Absolutely, 100% make sure you use Sodium + Iris https://irisshaders.net/ if you want any chance of things being playable. Using optifine with this shader I'd only get 20fps total or so.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Performance on the "official" Bedrock RTX version is a little bit better, as its WAY, WAY more CPU optimized. Although the ray tracing itself seems a bit excessive.
 
Oh yeah, for an idea of what shaders do.
Same(ish) location as that first one, but night time with shaders off and on.
Keep in mind that there are some default extra shaders built into Sodium + IRIS, but I get about 150fps with shaders off, and my GPU is only around 30% (1440p) My screen maxes at 165hz
20230115165856_1.jpg
20230115165849_1.jpg

That second picture, night time with ray tracing and shaders turned partially up, is 100% GPU and around 30-40fps, though that changes dramatically depending on what i'm looking at. Certain reflection heavy blocks TANK the FPS.
 
I think that it would be good to talk with your son and determine exactly what it is that he wants to do in Minecraft that he cannot do now. My understanding is that the benefits of Ray-Tracing usually only come into play in fairly high-end systems, as a result, I think that rasterization would still be the best option for an older system like yours. Does your son explicitly want ray-tracing or does he just want improved visuals or are there other issues with the computer that he just doesn't like such as performance or sluggishness? My opinion is that when a PC is past its time and starts running slow it's not always obvious to the user that it's time to upgrade the whole thing. Maybe your son is focusing in on ray-tracing but maybe there are other factors around the general age of the machine that are prompting him to come to you(?) I just think it would be unfortunate to go ahead and buy a new GPU only to have to replace the whole system in a year be left with a GPU that isn't fast enough to swap into a new machine.

I think when a CPU gets this old it is a very reasonable thing to just look at building something new. I mean, it's not just the CPU speed that is the problem, the mem speed is very slow, your motherboard will probably cap you at 16 GB, no option for NVME's. Does it even have a SSD or is it using an old 5400RPM HDD like mine does? Also, how is your PSU? Will it be enough to handle the TDP of a faster GPU?

I am still using my 2010 PC which has a Intel i3-540 which is actually somewhat close in performance to your Phenom II X6 and was released in the same year. I upgraded the RAM in mine from 4 GB to 8 GB this past year and it does run better but it is still not great. Side-to-side against my 2022 PC it is not even in the same universe, the performance in games is not even close and even light multitasking still overwhelms it even with the extra RAM. I just don't think that it is worth it to try to put anymore $$ into it. Your experiences might be different than mine though (your CPU does have 6 cores and turbo, while mine is dual core with no hyperthreading and no boost). That said, even if your son's system is a bit better than mine, I just can't imagine having great experiences doing anything (even casual videos or youtube) on a computer that is that old. When he moves over to a newer system it will be like stepping into a whole new world and he will probably realize just how much he has been missing without even knowing it.

EDIT: I re-read your original post and it sounds like you're planning to also upgrade the CPU, memory and motherboard as well? Is this going to happen all at the same time or will it be staggered?
 
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gvx64 said:
I think that it would be good to talk with your son and determine exactly what it is that he wants to do in Minecraft that he cannot do now. My understanding is that the benefits of Ray-Tracing usually only come into play in fairly high-end systems, as a result, I think that rasterization would still be the best option for an older system like yours. Does your son explicitly want ray-tracing or does he just want improved visuals or are there other issues with the computer that he just doesn't like such as performance or sluggishness? My opinion is that when a PC is past its time and starts running slow it's not always obvious to the user that it's time to upgrade the whole thing. Maybe your son is focusing in on ray-tracing but maybe there are other factors around the general age of the machine that are prompting him to come to you(?) I just think it would be unfortunate to go ahead and buy a new GPU only to have to replace the whole system in a year be left with a GPU that isn't fast enough to swap into a new machine.

I think when a CPU gets this old it is a very reasonable thing to just look at building something new. I mean, it's not just the CPU speed that is the problem, the mem speed is very slow, your motherboard will probably cap you at 16 GB, no option for NVME's. Does it even have a SSD or is it using an old 5400RPM HDD like mine does? Also, how is your PSU? Will it be enough to handle the TDP of a faster GPU?

I am still using my 2010 PC which has a Intel i3-540 which is actually somewhat close in performance to your Phenom II X6 and was released in the same year. I upgraded the RAM in mine from 4 GB to 8 GB this past year and it does run better but it is still not great. Side-to-side against my 2022 PC it is not even in the same universe, the performance in games is not even close and even light multitasking still overwhelms it even with the extra RAM. I just don't think that it is worth it to try to put anymore $$ into it. Your experiences might be different than mine though (your CPU does have 6 cores and turbo, while mine is dual core with no hyperthreading and no boost). That said, even if your son's system is a bit better than mine, I just can't imagine having great experiences doing anything (even casual videos or youtube) on a computer that is that old. When he moves over to a newer system it will be like stepping into a whole new world and he will probably realize just how much he has been missing without even knowing it.

EDIT: I re-read your original post and it sounds like you're planning to also upgrade the CPU, memory and motherboard as well? Is this going to happen all at the same time or will it be staggered?
Click to expand...
Planning on it all at the same time he just wants the visuals and thinks ray tracing sounds cool. I spoke to him about shaders and he seems happy with them as well. Here is what I’m looking at:

9th gen i3, 8gb ddr4, asrock mobo, rx 6500 xt video card. What’s everyone think of that?

We have a 250gb ssd and a 500 watt modular power supply in it now that we plan on carrying over
 
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jfnirvana292 said:
Planning on it all at the same time he just wants the visuals and thinks ray tracing sounds cool. I spoke to him about shaders and he seems happy with them as well. Here is what I’m looking at:

9th gen i3, 8gb ddr4, asrock mobo, rx 6500 xt video card. What’s everyone think of that?

We have a 250gb ssd and a 500 watt modular power supply in it now that we plan on carrying over
Click to expand...
You'll likely want to make sure to either get a pci-e 4.0 system, or an rx6600. The 6600 has a fair bit of enthusiastic fans on this board for its price/performance ratio in current market conditions.

The 6500xt, on the other hand, has gotten quite a following of haters; In their infinite wisdom amd decided to bork the 6500xt with only four pcie lanes, which is fine with 4.0, but, from what I gather, not so with 3.0, slicing 10%-20% of performance on 3.0
 
jfnirvana292 said:
Planning on it all at the same time he just wants the visuals and thinks ray tracing sounds cool. I spoke to him about shaders and he seems happy with them as well. Here is what I’m looking at:

9th gen i3, 8gb ddr4, asrock mobo, rx 6500 xt video card. What’s everyone think of that?

We have a 250gb ssd and a 500 watt modular power supply in it now that we plan on carrying over
Click to expand...
Not a fan of the 6500XT. Try to squeeze out the cash for a 6600.
 
jfnirvana292 said:
Planning on it all at the same time he just wants the visuals and thinks ray tracing sounds cool. I spoke to him about shaders and he seems happy with them as well. Here is what I’m looking at:

9th gen i3, 8gb ddr4, asrock mobo, rx 6500 xt video card. What’s everyone think of that?

We have a 250gb ssd and a 500 watt modular power supply in it now that we plan on carrying over
Click to expand...
I am not as knowledgeable as some of the people on this board (so somebody please correct me if some of what I say below is not completely accurate), but I recommend looking into how much more money would it be to go with an i3-12100F setup, overall, for your son. I recently did a side-by-side comparison of 9th-13th gen intel systems here:

https://hardforum.com/threads/4-generations-at-the-same-time.2023898/#post-1045549263

As you can see, if you were to squeeze in an i3-12100F with your budget you would not only be getting a much faster CPU for a comparable price (at least for the CPU module, not sure about the Mobo) but you would have the easy capability to upgrade to a midrange 13th gen CPU down the road (or even a high-end one if you upgrade your PSU) without necessarily having to replace the motherboard and RAM again, since gen 12 and 13 use the same socket. The 9th gen was the last gen for Socket LGA 1151 and so there is not a whole lot of upgrade potential with that CPU. Also, I would recommend skipping LGA 1200 (10th and 11th gen), I used 11th gen in my 2022 build because I was forced to in order to build a Shuttle but my i5-11400F isn't even as fast as a i3-12100F would be. Finally, I think that 12th gen can do DDR4 and DDR5 with relatively comparable performance and so if you want to save some money, then DDR4 is probably a fairly safe bet.

Also, the RX 6500 XT is very similar in performance to the GTX 1650 Super I used in my 2022 build. Just keep in mind that most serious gamers consider me a "gaming peasant" for buying a GTX 1650 Super in 2022. I only bought this GPU because the Shuttle barebones PC stuck me with a 300W PSU with a 6-pin connector and it blew my budget to pay another $150 to upgrade to a 500W. With the 500W PSU that you are using, however, I strongly believe that your system can handle up to an RTX 2060 with ease and that GPU can be found at fairly bargain prices now. I think that your system could probably even handle an RTX 3050 which would have the more advanced ray-tracing support than either the RX 6500XT or RTX 2060. That said, I often see RTX 3050 GPU specifications recommending minimum 550W PSU's for some reason and so you might want to research this option a little more (I have heard that Ampere GPU's can have more power spikes than earlier gens?, but I am not 100% sure on this one). That said, I have seen RTX 2060's with 500W PSU recommendations and so if you are using an i3 12th gen 65W CPU I am sure that you would be OK provided that you have a quality, new 500W PSU. I believe that the RTX 2060 will have better RT support than the AMD option partly because it is much faster (thereby better justifying the use of ray-tracing) but also because NVidia is the progenitor of Ray Tracing and is just better at it than AMD is right now.
 
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Forgive me, but this will be a bit long winded with a lot of experience from minecraft...

My son and I have played a lot of minecraft together...

First question: are you playing bedrock or java?

This one is pretty important.

If you are on bedrock, then you'd need a card that can do ray tracing out of the box. It looks great. However, there aren't very many mods or texture packs and what not for bedrock. In our situation, we started on bedrock, but moved to java just because of all the different mods we can add. I think we have something like 40 now on our home server. If you are on bedrock, you're probably looking at a 3060 or so at the low end.

If you are on java, then as others have said, you can use a shader to create those effects. I really like the SEUS PTGI ones...it does path tracing, which is essentially what ray tracing does. The only thing i don't like about PTGI is it does not play with Distant Horizons at this time. Then there are the non path tracing ones like SEUS renewed or sildurs. Again, they are cool, but when you get to reflections in water you can tell they are not path tracing. PTGI takes a lot of rasterization performance to run.

At one point, I tried to figure out just what it would take to run PTGI and I had a bunch of mining cards laying around, so I plugged in a few in my 5950x system and looked...

First, I used version 1.18.2 and loaded up all the performance mods I could like fabric, etc. I can't remember how many chunks I had it do, but it really wasn't very many. I tried with an RX 570 4gb and I got maybe 15-20 fps in this course I made to run through. So then I tried an RX 580 8gb and it was a little better...maybe 20-25fps. I think I also tested a 1060 6gb and it was better, but it sure didn't light the world on fire; maybe 30fps or something. My little test course wasn't in a particularly busy area either. If I were to try it in my town with all the stuff that has been built, it would probably be 75% of that based on my experience with my real system...

For AMD, this problem is even worse. If I remember right, the java version is based on OpenGL and the AMD driver set just is not optimized very well for OpenGL. Sometime in the last year, AMD redid some of the drivers to help with OpenGL, but it still isn't where it needs to be. So those recommendations for an AMD card, I'd be tempted to think again if minecraft is your use scenario. I'd definately avoid the RX 6500xt. Based on all the tests, you can get similar or better performance out of a used RX 570 4gb and save quite a bit.



What is your budget?
 
jfnirvana292 said:
Planning on it all at the same time he just wants the visuals and thinks ray tracing sounds cool. I spoke to him about shaders and he seems happy with them as well. Here is what I’m looking at:

9th gen i3, 8gb ddr4, asrock mobo, rx 6500 xt video card. What’s everyone think of that?

We have a 250gb ssd and a 500 watt modular power supply in it now that we plan on carrying over
Click to expand...
Is that 8GB DDR4 2 sticks or 1? But otherwise seems fine to me, but I'd at least try to spring for a 6600. Its a solid 1080p card. 6500 XT was basically mobile GPU they repurposed into a desktop part. It's predecessor, the 5500XT was actually faster.
 
jfnirvana292 said:
Planning on it all at the same time he just wants the visuals and thinks ray tracing sounds cool. I spoke to him about shaders and he seems happy with them as well. Here is what I’m looking at:

9th gen i3, 8gb ddr4, asrock mobo, rx 6500 xt video card. What’s everyone think of that?

We have a 250gb ssd and a 500 watt modular power supply in it now that we plan on carrying over
Click to expand...
Pain points:

People have already gone on ad-nauseum about the RX6500. It's just choc-full of stupid compromises. I'd skip it.

8gb of RAM ain't gonna cut it. Modded Minecraft wants ~6gb on its own now, and will only grow in the future. Meanwhile, we're watching the OS footprint grow in real-time. And Chrome is an absolute pig. As is everything else. You've got games coming out now need more than that at minimum. RAM is cheap; get 16gb to start.

I know you already have the 250gb SSD, but you're setting yourself up for the hassle of an upgrade in the near future. We live in a world where LEGO games need 40gb, and Harry Potter games need 85gb. Consider whether <$70 for a 1tb WD Green SSD is worth it.
 
Sir Beregond said:
Is that 8GB DDR4 2 sticks or 1? But otherwise seems fine to me, but I'd at least try to spring for a 6600. Its a solid 1080p card. 6500 XT was basically mobile GPU they repurposed into a desktop part. It's predecessor, the 5500XT was actually faster.
Click to expand...

Patriot Viper Steel RGB DDR4 8GB (1 x 8GB) 3200MHz Module - PVSR48G320C8​

 
XenIneX said:
Pain points:

People have already gone on ad-nauseum about the RX6500. It's just choc-full of stupid compromises. I'd skip it.

8gb of RAM ain't gonna cut it. Modded Minecraft wants ~6gb on its own now, and will only grow in the future. Meanwhile, we're watching the OS footprint grow in real-time. And Chrome is an absolute pig. As is everything else. You've got games coming out now need more than that at minimum. RAM is cheap; get 16gb to start.

I know you already have the 250gb SSD, but you're setting yourself up for the hassle of an upgrade in the near future. We live in a world where LEGO games need 40gb, and Harry Potter games need 85gb. Consider whether <$70 for a 1tb WD Green SSD is worth it.
Click to expand...
Good points. Going to do some more digging on the video card. Ordered the case, i3 and motherboard so far.
 
applegrcoug said:
Forgive me, but this will be a bit long winded with a lot of experience from minecraft...

My son and I have played a lot of minecraft together...

First question: are you playing bedrock or java?

This one is pretty important.

If you are on bedrock, then you'd need a card that can do ray tracing out of the box. It looks great. However, there aren't very many mods or texture packs and what not for bedrock. In our situation, we started on bedrock, but moved to java just because of all the different mods we can add. I think we have something like 40 now on our home server. If you are on bedrock, you're probably looking at a 3060 or so at the low end.

If you are on java, then as others have said, you can use a shader to create those effects. I really like the SEUS PTGI ones...it does path tracing, which is essentially what ray tracing does. The only thing i don't like about PTGI is it does not play with Distant Horizons at this time. Then there are the non path tracing ones like SEUS renewed or sildurs. Again, they are cool, but when you get to reflections in water you can tell they are not path tracing. PTGI takes a lot of rasterization performance to run.

At one point, I tried to figure out just what it would take to run PTGI and I had a bunch of mining cards laying around, so I plugged in a few in my 5950x system and looked...

First, I used version 1.18.2 and loaded up all the performance mods I could like fabric, etc. I can't remember how many chunks I had it do, but it really wasn't very many. I tried with an RX 570 4gb and I got maybe 15-20 fps in this course I made to run through. So then I tried an RX 580 8gb and it was a little better...maybe 20-25fps. I think I also tested a 1060 6gb and it was better, but it sure didn't light the world on fire; maybe 30fps or something. My little test course wasn't in a particularly busy area either. If I were to try it in my town with all the stuff that has been built, it would probably be 75% of that based on my experience with my real system...

For AMD, this problem is even worse. If I remember right, the java version is based on OpenGL and the AMD driver set just is not optimized very well for OpenGL. Sometime in the last year, AMD redid some of the drivers to help with OpenGL, but it still isn't where it needs to be. So those recommendations for an AMD card, I'd be tempted to think again if minecraft is your use scenario. I'd definately avoid the RX 6500xt. Based on all the tests, you can get similar or better performance out of a used RX 570 4gb and save quite a bit.



What is your budget?
Click to expand...
Big favor, could you please link to the site for the shaders? How do you install? Do you drop the files in a folder? Or do you import while in minecraft? Thanks!
 
jfnirvana292 said:
How would a Gtx 1660 be? Better than the radeon? It’s really the max (money) I’d do.
Click to expand...
Originally, I replied to you saying that only RTX Nividia card support ray-tracing but I guess that is for hardware-level only. Apparently the GTX 1660 was given driver-level ray-tracing support at some point after its release. That said according to this quora thread it sounds like the GTX 1660's version of ray-tracing support does not work in Minecraft:

https://www.quora.com/Can-GTX-1660-Super-run-Minecraft-RTX

So I guess my original recommendation stands. If you want ray-tracing, I would recommend the RTX 2060 for hardware level ray-tracing support that will work in Minecraft. You should be able to find an RTX 2060 for a very similar price to that of the GTX 1660 nowadays. If your budget is really tight would you consider buying a used one?

That said, if you are OK with shader-level support like what applegrcoug is mentioning then you shouldn't need hardware-level ray-tracing and I don't see why a GTX 1660 would not be enough, at least for 1920x1080 gaming.
 
NightReaver said:
Because shaders, like RTX, can really hammer your gpu depending on how nice you want it to look. Yes, even at 1080p.
Click to expand...
Yeah, but given his budget and the fact that he was about to buy an RX 6500XT I am sure that we can agree that the GTX 1660 would be leagues better. I am sure that the extra 2 GB of VRAM will make a significant difference.

That said, I agree the RTX 2060 is the best choice, especially if hardware-based ray-tracing is preferred. If I were the OP I would seriously look at buying a used RTX 2060 over a new GTX 1660.
 
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