Minecraft CPU Benchmarks: Game Launch Speed
I did end up measuring how long the game takes to launch, but take this as a very rough guideline, the time was only taken once (although sometimes I had to relaunch and it was consistent) and it may ever so slightly be influenced by internet connectivity as the game does some account authentication stuff at boot from what I remember.
Vanilla Launch Speeds
These are the launch times for the unmodded versions I tested, I'm not including the 1.20.4 with shaders version as it seems to wildly vary, maybe there is some GPU driver-side trickery going on while the shaders are loading which makes it unpredictable.
| Game Launch Time | Vanilla 1.20.4 | Vanilla 1.17.1 (Until CPU Idle) | Beta 1.7.3 |
|---|---|---|---|
| Intel Core i7-12700KF | 8s | 12s | 1s |
| AMD Ryzen 9 7900X3D | 9s | 14s | 2s |
| AMD Ryzen 7 5800X3D | 9s | 17s | 2s |
| AMD Ryzen 5 5600 | 9s | 17s | 2s |
| AMD Ryzen 5 3600 | 11s | 21s | 3s |
| AMD Ryzen 5 2600 | 12s | 28s | 3s |
| Intel Core i5-5675C | 14s | 47s | 3s |
| Intel Core i5-4460 | 15s | 49s | 3s |
| AMD FX-8350 | 17s | 47s | 4s |
In general the numbers should be rather self-explanatory - it is the time from clicking play to seeing the main menu - with the exception of Vanilla 1.17.1 (and many versions around there, but I'm not testing those). These versions continue running very heavy background routines after the main menu is shown, so I'm not counting the menu, I'm counting the time until the CPU settles back down to idle utilization, since on a lot of the older CPUs, the background usage is high enough that it makes loading into a world practically impossible.
Modded Launch Speed
For modded the launch times are understandably much longer due to the inclusion of many third-party mods.
| Game Launch Time | Modded 1.6.4 | Modded 1.18.2 |
|---|---|---|
| AMD Ryzen 9 7900X3D | 54s | 38s |
| Intel Core i7-12700KF | 55s | 34s |
| AMD Ryzen 7 5800X3D | 1min 4s | 41s |
| AMD Ryzen 5 5600 | 1m 8s | 42s |
| AMD Ryzen 5 3600 | 1m 20s | 48s |
| AMD Ryzen 5 2600 | 1m 51s | 1m 3s |
| Intel Core i5-5675C | 1min 55s | 59s |
| Intel Core i5-4460 | 1m 58s | 1m 1s |
| AMD FX-8350 | 2min 33s | 1min 43s |
From the results it seems to favor single-core performance more than the vanilla game, which makes sense since mod initialization is single-threaded and sequential, which is very noticeable with the 1.6.4 modpack where there is a clear long period of purely one CPU thread being utilized.
In either case the results are very similar across the board, with the Ryzen 9 7900X3D and Core i7-12700KF trading blows, the older Ryzens being ordered by generation and the FX-8350 firmly in last place where everyone expects it.