Darren Straight

I would also like to confirm this is still an issue on 1.7.4.

Been hoping this issue would disappear in each snapshot and the latest 1.7.1 pre-release, unfortunately however the issues persists. Such a shame as fixing this really would solve a lot of issues for players. Just need to stop text on signs being rendered when at a distance that you can't actually read the text.

I can confirm this is a massive issue in 1.6 and wasnt in 1.5. I have gone back to test the same copy of worlds in 1.5 and indeed no issues.

The main culprit as said above is signs with text on, blanks signs are not as bad on lowering FPS.

I went out in the wild where I was getting 80-100 FPS and generated a 255 block high wall containing wall signs (totalling 10200 signs) and measured the FPS, it was low but not as bad as I thought it would be, 25 FPS or so. I was getting worse in areas with less signs.

So I then decided to do the same again, 1 wall containing 10200 wall signs, but this time with every sign containing 4 lines of random text, as soon as I generated this my FPS decreased drastically, ranging from 2 - 8 FPS.

This of course was a bit of an overkill on signs, but it was an interesting test and made me find out that it was indeed signs with text on that caused the problem.

The problem is Minecraft seems to render the text even if you cant actually read it from far away, which in my opinion is pointless.

Ive been using optifine as a solution which only renders sign text when you are actually near enough to be able to read it but as we run a family friendly server with people of all ages, some of the younger ones are unsure how to install this or not allowed to by their parents.

it would be nice if the default client, did what optifine does.