this post was submitted on 29 Jul 2026
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I have never actually played Minecraft itself, just open-source clones like Luanti, but I could very easily believe that those have extremely low VRAM requirements, even if the engine isn't optimized. Most VRAM goes to storing textures, and Minecraft normally has few textures and very low-resolution textures.
Thing is, I also would guess that unless the engine is really inefficient, that GPU isn't really buying much, either. Like, you have lot of crunching power and bandwidth, sure, but you probably don't have many visible triangles either.
Maybe some modded Minecraft?
searches
https://old.reddit.com/r/Minecraft/comments/31es0c/cpu_bottleneck/
If that's true, if people have done some really crazy shader mods or someone's using ReShade or similar, maybe they could be soaking up that GPU compute power. Though...I have no idea what kind of system this guy is talking about. He could be talking about a cell phone or something too...
On further thought, one edge use case that might make sense
suppose you're a multiplayer online gamer who is only interested in getting an edge in multiplayer online games and don't really care at all about what a game looks like. OLED displays can offer considerably higher reasonable framerates than past monitors, maybe 500 Hz or more. You might be able to crank the texture settings in a number of games all the way down, just look at a blurry mess, and use an OLED display and have a video card that can, as long as it isn't crashing into memory limitations, render high framerates.
There are also a handful of games that don't use textures on polygons, sort of the Avara or Star Fox style. Most of those are older and target systems before hardware acceleration, but I can think of a few newer ones. I personally like Carrier Command 2*, and that has almost-entirely untextured polygons, and where it does use textures, they're low resolution. I don't know what the VRAM requirements are for the geometry, but the listed system requirements on Steam are for 1GB VRAM cards. I don't think that any of those are actually games where framerate matters much, but if you wanted to render those at very high resolution or on multiple monitors or something (if the game can support that?), it might make sense.
I mean, this is really just a mental exercise
I don't think that the OEM in question is really trying to develop a system that's actually well-suited to any entry-level-gaming users. But if you were looking for very specialized gaming niches, you could maybe find something that the system could actually serve well at.
Those are the requirements for the upcoming Vulkan renderer update to the Java edition of Minecraft, which supposedly will feature a lot more complicated lighting and shaders.
The previous releases used old versions of OpenGL where a lot of time is spent waiting to synchronously dispatch commands to the hardware, and even then it didn't make very good use of the GPU hardware it has available. It still doesn't use LODs from what I heard, but to give them some credit, they did finally start to use VBOs about a decade in development.