16w04a was the first 1.9 snapshot I tried. About three quarters of the time, starting a game resulted in massive, overwhelming visual glitching. This occurred regardless of whether I was opening (a copy of) one of my existing 1.8 worlds or creating a brand new world in 1.9. Either way, sometimes it'd load fine, sometimes it'd be chaos.
The visual effect was more or less what can be seen starting at 36 seconds into https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f6MuH80mlVA (I got a chaotic jumble of miscellaneous overworld fragments instead of a chaotic jumble of miscellaneous nether fragments, presumably because I wasn't in the nether at the time).
The creator of that video indicated that he had the problem when he increased render distance in Video Settings, so I tried reducing my render distance all the way down to 4 chunks, but it didn't fix the problem.
Then I experimented with other Video Settings and found that the problem DID go away once I set "Use VBOs" to "ON". It only seems to happen when VBOs are OFF.
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CubeTheThird
Duplicate of MC-62958. Broken/outdated AMD graphics drivers. It even describes the solution in that video's comments.
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Screenshot of my display driver version etc
CubeTheThird
The driver date information is incorrect, as AMD has not supported that graphics card since 2012. What I notice however, is that you are using windows 10, whereas your graphics card isn't supported beyond Windows 8 (not 8.1). You will need to downgrade Windows in order to get proper driver support.
For technical support please use the Mojang Support Center.
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Since turning VBOs on fixes the problem entirely, wouldn't it be possible to just detect the broken drivers and force VBOs on automatically, rather than leaving people with "upgrade your drivers or downgrade your operating system!" as the best available advice? I'm techie enough to be able to get on the Minecraft bug tracking system, research the problem, figure out driver upgrades if necessary, etc, but not everyone is.
(For obvious security reasons, advising people to downgrade to an operating system that isn't supported by Microsoft any more is a really bad idea!)
CubeTheThird
This is not the only case where graphics drivers cause issues with Minecraft (amongst other things), and it would be a lot of work for the developers to add code every time a driver version causes an issue. I know of no other software project (particularly not games) that do what you are requesting. Regardless, I am not advising you to downgrade to an unsupported version of Windows. The most recent version of Windows Microsoft stopped supporting was Windows XP.