Low performance with the Vulkan rendering backend on Intel Arc GPUs (especially on Linux)

Mine is really bad in snapshot 2. Could be my graphics drivers though.

Ok I tested same seed in snapshot 1. There is definitely a significant regression in snapshot 2.

I'm experiencing the same issue on my end: OpenGL reaches up to around 800 fps, while Vulkan only hits about 400 at most.

CPU: 12400F, GPU: B580.My operating system is Windows 11 24H2, and the graphics driver is the official 8629 WHQL version.

I can reproduce this on my machine running OpenSUSE Tumbleweed 20260422 with additional drivers from PackMan (links2linux)

Testing Minecraft 26.2-snapshot-4, No modifications made to the game or to the Java runtime. No environment variables or debug arguments.

Java args: -Duser.language=en -Xms2048m -Xmx8192m

CPU: AMD Ryzen 7600X

GPU: Intel Arc B580

Kernel version: 6.19.12-1-default

Graphics driver version: Mesa 26.0.4 (git-d9e5e36b19)

Graphics card firmware: BMG__21.1177

1280x720 windowed, Fabulous! graphics preset, normal world generation, flying in creative mode to get a good view, gamerule advance_time false

On OpenGL: 280-300 FPS

On Vulkan: 11-12 FPS

On OpenGL via Zink (OpenGL on Vulkan): 175-185 FPS

I hope this comment doesn’t add too much extra noise, I just wanted to put slightly more solid numbers on just how bad the performance is on Intel Arc. When I force it to use the AMD iGPU, Vulkan is faster, so clearly it’s not that Mojang’s implementation of Vulkan is inherently bad, it just doesn’t play well with Intel.

I can reproduce this on 26.2 snapshot 6

• CPU: AMD Ryzen 7 5700G

• GPU: Intel Arc A750

• OS: Arch Linux (7.0.3-zen1-2-zen kernel)

• Desktop: KDE Plasma 6.6.4

• Driver: Mesa 26.0.6-arch1.1

• Java: -Duser.language=en -Xms256m -Xmx4096m (version 25.0.1)

Screenshot of video settings:

OpenGL (~400 FPS):

Vulkan (10-11 FPS):

I’m having this exact issue too, but with the battlemage card, I made a bug report on it too, MC-307930

I’d also like to add that this isn’t an issue with NVIDIA cards, which isn’t much of a surprise because I believe that mojang uses NVIDIA gpus

I can reproduce on Pre2 as well with a B580 under windows.
OpenGL: 165 fps
Vulkan: 70 fps

I can reproduce this on Pre2 as well, and it’s even worse on Linux than it is on Windows from what I’m seeing.

CPU: AMD Ryzen 5 5500
GPU: Intel Arc B580
RAM: 16GB DDR4 3200 MHz

OpenGL performance (on average):

Vulkan Performance (on average, same world):

My processor is an Intel iGPU, and in my case it's the same as, and sometimes worse than, OpenGL. The game stutters, the mobs lag, and even with fantastic graphics at 32 chunks, the FPS is between 30 and 5 with Vulkan selected, while OpenGL effortlessly reaches 60 FPS.

Nvidia Jetson Orin Nano Super Developer Kit
Jetpack 7.2 (Ubuntu 24.04)
GNOME Desktop

Vulkan backend:
Xorg: 101fps
Xwayland: 55fps (not very stable fps)
Wayland: 55fps (not very stable)

OpenGL backend:
Xorg: 75fps
Xwayland: 44fps
Wayland: 75fps

I have also verified these results (in a different world, so numbers don’t match) on KDE Plasma as well with the same distribution.

So there are seemingly two issues (which may or may not be related), poor Xwayland (the default experience when running minecraft on wayland) performance on OpenGL and poor Vulkan performance on Xwayland and Wayland.

(note that the native wayland backend was enabled with -DMC_DEBUG_ENABLED -DMC_DEBUG_PREFER_WAYLAND java args and verified functional)

On my test system (see previous message), I was able to greatly improve the performance in OpenGL and Xorg Wayland usecases such that the performance is now the same as Xorg for OpenGL and only marginally slower for Vulkan by manually building and installing the NVIDIA egl-wayland2 library (which is more efficient than the egl-wayland library) and upgrading from kubuntu with plasma 5.27 to neon with plasma 6.6.5.

new numbers (different location/world that previous test case and new desktop environment, so not directly comparable):

Plasma 6.6.5

Vulkan Backend:
Wayland: 108fps
Xwayland: ~44fps (unstable)
Xorg: 117fps

OpenGL Backend:
Wayland: 64fps
Xwayland: ~35fps (unstable)
Xorg: 66fps

I hoped that upgrading the NVIDIA egl-x11 library would improve xwayland performance in both cases however there has been no improvement for me so far.