Performance tips

Faster alternative to xvfb

Running MineRL on xvfb will slow it down by 2-3x as the rendering is done on CPU, not on the GPU. A potential alternative is to use a combination of VirtualGL and virtual displays from nvidia tools.

Note that this may interfere with your display/driver setup, and may not work on cloud VMs (nvidia-xconfig is not available).

Following commands outline the procedure. You may need to adapt it to suit your needs. After these commands, run export DISPLAY=:0 and you should be ready to run MineRL. The Minecraft window will be rendered in a virtual display.

All credits go to Tencent researchers who kindly shared this piece of information!

sudo apt install lightdm libglu1-mesa mesa-utils xvfb xinit xserver-xorg-video-dummy

sudo nvidia-xconfig -a --allow-empty-initial-configuration --virtual=1920x1200 --busid PCI:0:8:0
cd /tmp
wget https://nchc.dl.sourceforge.net/project/virtualgl/2.6.3/virtualgl_2.6.3_amd64.deb
sudo dpkg -i virtualgl_2.6.3_amd64.deb

sudo service lightdm stop
sudo vglserver_config
sudo service lightdm start