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

Docker images for headless rendering with GPU

The above instructions might not work with a server without root access. You may use this docker file (alternatives can be found here and here instead).

To begin with, build & run this docker on your server.

git clone https://github.com/jeasinema/egl-docker && cd egl-docker
docker build . -t <docker_name>
docker run --gpus all -it <docker_name>:latest /bin/bash

Inside the container, use the following command to verify if the GPU rendering is working. If you can see something like OpenGL Renderer: NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3090/PCIe/SSE2, congratulations. Otherwise output like OpenGL Renderer: llvmpipe (LLVM 12.0.0, 256 bits) indicates you’re still using CPU. Feel free to post to this repo if you have any issues.

vglrun /opt/VirtualGL/bin/glxspheres64

You’re good to go! Just prepend your commands with vglrun to enable GPU rendering.

Acknowledgements: This docker image is brought to you by Xiaojian Ma and the MineDoJo team, and it is developed upon this project by Seungmin Kim.