What can you do if your game is completely lagging? Playing Minecraft with lag is neither fun nor easy on the eyes. Increasing the RAM is one possible solution to this problem. Here you will also learn how to change the patch of your installation.

Change Version of Minecraft to an Older One

In order to play on a server, you may need to change your Minecraft version to match that of the server. To do this, go to Installations in the Minecraft Java Launcher and create a New Installation.

Various installations of Minecraft in the Java Launcher

You give this installation a name and here you can also change the icon of the installation. Under Version, you select the desired patch and at the same time check the allocated RAM under More options.

You can find out how to change the RAM to a reasonable value in the next section. Finally, click Create and this will allow you to play on an older version of Minecraft.

Minecraft Lags? Increase RAM in the Launcher!

Only 2GB of RAM is allocated by default in the Minecraft Java Launcher. If the RAM is full, you will notice this through lag and freezes.

To increase RAM, go to Installations. There you click on the installation of Minecraft that you want to allocate more RAM to.

Click More Options at the bottom. There you will find JVM arguments that you can change.

Minecraft installation settings. Below are the JVM arguments.

By default, this text is in the JVM arguments:

-Xmx2G -XX:+UnlockExperimentalVMOptions -XX:+UseG1GC -XX:G1NewSizePercent=20 -XX:G1ReservePercent=20 -XX:MaxGCPauseMillis=50 -XX:G1HeapRegionSize=32M

The "2" in the first argument represents the GB of RAM available for Minecraft. You can change that to 8 or 16 GB, for example, and save it.

-Xmx8G

In Minecraft, you can check whether your changes were applied correctly. To do this, press F3 in the game, which opens the debug screen. The 8GB memory should now appear at the top right.

In the Minecraft debug screen you can see how much RAM is available.

If you have an Nvidia graphics card, it can also help to select Minecraft in Nvidia GeForce Experience and optimize the game. With this, the tool selects the optimal game settings for your PC.

Minecraft