Minecraft Now 30% Faster With Open-Source AMD Radeon Driver On Linux

Those using the open-source AMD Radeon OpenGL driver "RadeonSI" on Linux the performance within the popular Minecraft game is about to be a lot better.

Longtime open-source AMD Mesa developer Marek Olšák landed the change today to enable OpenGL threading behavior by default for the Minecraft game on Linux. The simple change is just to the Mesa defaults configuration so Mesa's glthread gets flipped on when running the Minecraft launcher executable.

Marek noted that enabling Mesa's OpenGL threading functionality for Minecraft is good for a 30% bump to performance. Those not riding Mesa 22.0-devel Git can also set the mesa_glthread=true environment variable to force-enable OpenGL threading on existing Mesa releases without having to wait for the configuration update.

At the same time, Marek also enabled the GL thread functionality too for the Basemark OpenGL benchmark.

Mesa OpenGL threading can be a performance win for many games as we have seen with the per-game/application whitelisting over the years. Though in some cases it can cause issues like the CS:GO trust factor problem earlier this year. Double digit gains are common for games that benefit from this Mesa multi-threading work.