[Brad]

Originally Posted by 709 Huh. I wonder if it's just a fence problem then, since there's still plenty of the nether version making up the ferris wheel.

I described the following as a likely possibility in-game last night, but I did a little more searching just now to verify that, yes, this is probably simply an issue with the fences having more to render. Blocks have touching faces and backfaces (normals pointed away from you, or the "backs" of the object) that the software culls from the render. (Backface culling is a common, fast, standard thing you do in any 3D rendering software.) Two side-by-side stone blocks do not render the two faces adjoining them on their touching side, but they do render the faces that are visible to you. Fences have a lot more faces to render and many of those faces are still visible (not culled) when touching another block.

https://twitter.com/Vechs/status/243055162376192000

@Vechs 16x16x256 chunk of: Stone=250 FPS. Fence=20 FPS. Iron Bars=110 FPS. Confirmed: Fences destroy your performance. 11:37 AM - 4 Sep 12

I found that I'm not the first to point out this issue, and one redditor (in response to Vechs' tweet) had generated the following images a year ago to further illustrate:




These are massive blocks of stone, fence, and iron bars. To get the second image, he issued a command to render faces with only polygon edges. This shows how much is actually being rendered.

See how the block of opaque solids has all but the front and side faces culled? That's because their geometry is ridiculously simple and all the interior touching faces and backfaces go away. The block of fences is not nearly so lucky because a significantly larger proportion of faces cannot be culled. The iron bars are also bad for the same reason but not as bad because an iron bars block has fewer faces to start with.

This is why when we tested last night, replacing with opaque solid blocks (cobblestone) doubled the frame rate for me and Elysium; our GPUs had less to work and could render more frames per second.

Originally Posted by 709 It can't be a "big build" thing, otherwise those people who rebuild entire areas (the Game of Thrones community build comes to mind) would just be in pain all the time. Maybe they ban certain blocks?

There are a couple of things here. First, these builds probably aren't made up largely of high-poly blocks like the fence. Second, some of the youtubers who work on and record those "big builds" in Minecraft do so either professionally (Yogscast makes enough YouTube ad money to employ a staff of a dozen people, for example) or are already serious gaming enthusiasts. They almost certainly have beefy hardware and expensive GPUs in their rigs to allow them a lot more leeway. If my GPU was better than a mid-range one from three years ago, I also probably wouldn't notice the frame drop. It would still happen, but I'd be cruising so high over 60 FPS that it wouldn't be visible.