Advanced OpenGL is found in the Video Settings section of Minecraft. The issue with this setting is that it isn’t explained very well and most players don’t even know what it does. If you want to know whether you should have Advanced OpenGL On or Off then you’re in the right place.

The main question we get asked about the video settings is “What does Advanced OpenGL do?”



Advanced OpenGL makes use of “occlusion culling”. In simpler terms this means that your game will not render anything that is not directly in view of the player. The game still “knows” where everything is, but they are simply not being processed.

This setting is of great help to users with low-end graphics cards (GPUs) as it reduces their load. However, in exchange for this your processor (CPU) must do some extra work in order to figure this all out.

This is exceptionally useful for users playing Minecraft on a laptop. Average laptops tend to have (very) low-end graphical capabilities but decent processors. A good example of this would be a relatively new laptop with an Intel i3 or i5 processor but integrated graphics.

Turning Advanced OpenGL on will help many laptop users by allowing their powerful CPUs to ease the load on their non-gaming graphics cards.

This can frequently mean that having Advanced OpenGL turned on causes a decent increase in FPS and stability of Minecraft.

However, Advanced OpenGL is a mysterious setting. You might expect that it would increase FPS for all users, but that isn’t the case. Some gamers report that it actually decreases the frame rate that their computers achieve. This can be tested by toggling the setting on and off and pressing F3 in game and examining FPS between the two.

If you are one of the people with decreased FPS then we simply advise you to play Minecraft with the setting turned off and not worry about it in future. No harm done!

Having Advanced OpenGL turned on can be worked in tandem with some of our other fixes, which you can find here.