Nowadays, online game playing has become an industry that is evolving rapidly. Game designers introduce many features daily to attract more users and give them a great experience.
Mipmapping is one such gaming feature added to Minecraft.
Mipmapping allows the game designers to improve the graphics of Minecraft while offering the players a quality game-playing experience.
In this post, I’ll go through a few questions regarding this feature, including what mipmap levels do in Minecraft, their importance, and their drawbacks.
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What Is Mipmapping In Minecraft?
Mipmapping is the process of taking a texture in-game and automatically scaling it down to get a sequence of images as an end product. A couple of factors scale down each image.
For example, the resolution of the first layer image could be 1K texture, and the last image of the sequence could be 1 pixel. So, the game engine can naturally scale down and use a smaller version of the same texture.
Let me explain the importance of this technique.
Why Is Mipmapping Important?
Mip mapping is helpful in 3D game rendering and 3D applications. The images near the camera get a higher texture, and the images farther from the camera are assigned lower textures.
For example, an image near the camera might be 1K in pixels, and the farthest image may be given 32 or below pixels. When you see farther in the background, you can understand pictures seem slightly blurred. That is due to the low pixel value assigned to those pictures.
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These characteristics of mipmapping allow games to maintain cache efficiency and increase render efficiency while reducing bandwidth usage.
The fascinating thing about this is that the game engine does all these things without significantly increasing the file texture size.
What Are Mipmap Levels In Minecraft?
As I mentioned earlier, mipmapping creates many images with scaled downed textures. Mipmap levels are these scaled-down images smaller than the original image in size.
Minecraft uses mipmap levels to enhance the quality of images. Moreover, mipmap levels offer details for each image in the sequence.
This feature allows the players to see quality images near the camera and low-quality images (blurred) farther from the camera’s background.
What Do Mipmap Levels Do In Minecraft?
As I mentioned, mipmap creates various resolutions from the same image and stores them for further usage. These downscaled images represent the levels in mipmapping.
Moreover, mipmaps reduce aliasing artifacts to improve the user experience. When the photographed object’s size surpasses the visual field’s resolution, aliasing artifacts appear along the phase encoding direction. An extraneous signal is seen as a transparent blob on the far side of the screen.
The enhanced image quality will lead to a better user experience leaving behind some side effects of the Minecraft gameplay. Mipmapping can also improve the quality of many images within a short period.
Does Mipmap Affect FPS?
Despite many claims about the mipmap’s influence on fps (frames per second), what I found and experienced is that there is no significant change that mipmap can do on fps.
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However, some have claimed a slight increase in fps due to increased memory usage. But, to achieve this, you must set the render distance higher.
Does Mipmapping Improve The Performance Of Minecraft?
The simple answer to the question is YES; mipmapping significantly improves the performance of Minecraft.
One of the primary ways to improve performance is improving the texture cache efficiency. The game automatically fits for lower resolution mipmaps allowing super speedy texture cache.
Another reason for the increased performance is mipmapping’s ability to reduce bandwidth usage.
How To Change Mipmap Levels In Minecraft?
Changing the mipmap levels in Minecraft is an easy job. There are a few ways to do it, and I will explain a couple of them.
Head on to the options and go to video settings. Scroll down in the window until you find the Mipmap level. You can set the levels from zero to four. After that, click done twice.
Another way of changing mipmap levels is by heading on to options.txt. It is located in your Minecraft folder. If you still can’t find the location, follow this path.
C:\Users\USERNAME\Documents\Curse\Minecraft\Instances\FTB Presents HermitPack\options.txt. This file should have “mipmap levels” as an option. You can change the value from 4 to 0 there.
Do Mipmap Levels Affect Minecraft Lag?
In the different stages of Minecraft, mipmap levels can cause lagging. For instance, when adjusting the mipmap level at the video settings, sometimes it can take a while to recalculate the newly assigned level, causing some lagging, such as the user interface needing to be more responsive and stuttering the screen.
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In some computers, the video slider jumps back to the previous level without responding to the user inputs.
Mipmapping uses a considerable amount of memory from the graphics card. This happens as mipmapping creates several textures of images and stores them for future use.
Therefore, if you play Minecraft on an old computer with no memory, Minecraft could lag due to mipmapping.
However, the good news is that you can quickly fix this issue by lowering the mipmap level. If you need the latest graphics card on your PC, play the game at a lower mipmap level.
What Are The Drawbacks Of Mipmap Levels?
Besides lagging (in the same cases only), I can’t think of any significant drawback of mipmapping.
However, I saw in one of the forums that someone complained about some image distortion and color changes in Minecraft’s background (farthest image layer).
I have yet to experience such an occurrence; therefore, unable to explain that at the moment.
Final Thoughts
Minecraft game developers add different kinds of features to enhance the user experience every day.
Mipmapping is not a technology that is solely used for Minecraft gameplay. It is image-enhancing technology and later incorporated with 3D game development.
Having weighed the pros and cons of mipmapping, I suggest you enjoy it when you play Minecraft, and I am sure you will have a better game experience.
