Minecraft, Vulkan, and You: What you need to know

This February, Mojang announced that Minecraft: Java Edition will be replacing its renderer, starting some time this summer. After 17 years on OpenGL, it is moving to something called “Vulkan”. If you’re a normal player, the words “Graphics API” probably don’t mean much to you, so, let’s take a minute to talk: What’s changing, why, and should you care?

What is Vulkan, and What’s Wrong With OpenGL?

An overview of what platforms Vulkan supports, graphic provided by vulkan.org

OpenGL is Old. Like… Really old. It was designed in the early 1990s, which means nearly as old as I am, and I’m practically dust by now. It hasn’t received any significant updates since 2017. You can think of it like a road that was built for carriages - it’s been technically functional for cars, but it was never built with any of them in mind, and the potholes are starting to be a problem.

One of OpenGL’s biggest weaknesses is that it’s single-threaded. What that means is, when Minecraft renders your world, all of that work is being handed to a single core - your fancy Ryzen 16-core turboblaster gaming 9000 that you overpaid for can only use a small fraction of its power, and that contributes to framerate loss and stuttering when in complex worlds or heavily-modded builds.

Vulkan, released in 2016 and actively maintained, was designed to actually use modern hardware. It spreads rendering tasks across multiple CPU cores, communicates more directly with your GPU, and in general just gets out of its own way when needed. Some graphical mods have already been made to allow Minecraft to use Vulkan; it’s possible some of your favorite modpacks have had those mods included and you’d never realize. The performance difference can be quite substantial.

What does this mean for you?

If you’re playing on reasonably modern hardware - that is, you got your hardware within the last decade or so - good news! You’re likely to see an immediate performance boost. Better frame rates, smoother chunkloading, and the upcoming Vibrant Visuals update all lie in your future, and the transition should be virtually seamless.

Many of your favorite games are already using Vulkan!

If you’re playing on old hardware, this might get a bit more complicated. Mojang has said that they intend to support both OpenGL and Vulkan for some time, but it wil eventually transition to Vulkan only. Once they’ve transitioned to Vulkan only, graphics cards manufactured around or before 2014 may no longer be able to run Minecraft. They have, however, promised that we will have substantial warning once they’ve made that decision, before removing OpenGL support. It’s also possible that, much like how there are mods that currently allow users to use Vulkan, modders may be able to make tools in the future that allow the game to continue using OpenGL.

Mac players are in an interesting spot, as Apple deprecated OpenGL years ago, and doesn’t support Vulkan directly. To solve this, Mojang will be using a translation layer called “MoltenVK” in order to run Vulkan calls directly through Apple’s own API. According to Mojang, this is one of the main reasons they had to make this change - Java edition has been stuck barely running on Mac for some time, and long-term it was going to be completely unfeasible to continue using OpenGL. Again, modded users have already managed to run Minecraft through MoltenVK, and results have been promising. This should be an all-around improvement for our Apple-using fans in the community.

What about my shaders? What about my mods?

A preview of Mojang's Vibrant Visuals, a set of built-in shaders they hope to bring to Java edition

This is, perhaps, going to be the roughest part of the transition. A lot of popular graphics mods - shader packs, visual overhauls, and tools like Iris - are built directly on top of OpenGL. Switching to Vulkan means that these will need to be fully rewritten, not just updated. Part of why Mojang is announcing this change as soon as possible, is so that modders can start preparing now, to be ready when the date comes. The developers behind Iris, for example, have already announced they are working on a Vulkan-based successor, which will be called Aperture.

Mojang will be running Vulkan in parallel with OpenGL throughout the snapshot testing this summer, so players will have the option to toggle between them and see the performance changes, and modders should be able to use this time to catch up. This is likely the best approach to the changeover we could expect, but if you like to run with a lot of graphical mods, you should anticipate a period of instability and missing features while everyone transitions.

The Bottom Line

Really, this change has been long overdue. Mojang has been working towards this for a while, and for players with modern hardware, this will be an all-around improvement, and a solid foundation for future Minecraft updates. This will be bumpy for heavily-modded players, but the modding community is great at staying agile and they’re already working to move forward. Mojang is being more communicative about the process than they often are about big changes, and it’s clear that they want to make sure we’re all prepared and forewarned.

If you want to run your own Minecraft server and see the changes for yourself when testing goes live this summer, we've got you covered. Setup takes minutes, and you can be up and running well before Vulkan hits the first snapshots.