Why Minecraft lovers on Potato PC should upgrade soon

 I was checking out the latest snapshot 21w06a and exploring all the changes. While this snapshot still does not incorporate all the changes, but it had enough to inspire me to write this post. 

Minecraft is known to run on really old hardware with an integrated graphics. If you have a working PC, there's a high chance you can run Minecraft(given you have atleast 4GB RAM). 

But not all of people are fortunate enough to play Minecraft at decent graphics settings. As a tech influencer, I've come across people asking for help getting playable FPS in Minecraft. Most common suggestion they get is to set the render distance at lowest. While you can do that and achieve playable framerates, you will miss the beautiful experiences/scenes like below

Minecraft 1.17 cave at 8 chunks render distance

Minecraft 1.17 cave at 2 chunks render distance

As you can see, playing with 2 chunks render distance means missing out on those beautiful terrain generation. 

Another demerit of setting low render distance is that if you are scouting for new biomes, you might miss the biome you're looking for by couple of blocks.

As you can see above, the desert biome is barely visible. You may walk right past it cuz it never rendered into your view due to low render distance.

Another difficulty will be gauging the remaining day/night time. You need to set your render distance to atleast 4 chunks to see astronomical bodies in Minecraft. 

Moon and stars are not visible below 4 chunks render

On top of that, upcoming 1.17 update has increased the build limits, indicating new much higher terrain generation(right now mountains generate upto 110 blocks high on average). 

1.17 update raised the build limit to 320 block from 256

These are the main reasons you should upgrade your system A.S.A.P. if you are playing below 8 chunks render distance because the upcoming Cave and Cliffs update(Minecraft 1.17) is going to be the biggest visual upgrade after the Update Aquatic in Minecraft history.  

And like I mentioned in the beginning, Minecraft is known to run on any functional PC. So if you will not be using shaders, any Laptop/Desktop with recently launched processor(within last 2-5 years) should be sufficient to provide smooth 60FPS.