And I can only assume that Java is why it runs at a crawl even at startup. But then, I only have 4 GB of RAM, enough to play pretty much every AAA game of today, but I guess Minecraft's ~cutting edge graphics~ are too complex.
I am skeptical of this claim, and I've spent a decent amount of time both writing C++ for games and in the Java guts of Minecraft. At one point it had pretty significant perf problems due to naive drawing behaviors; it does no longer and is pretty solidly optimized--though there's not much you can do about GC pauses, it doesn't really impact the gameplay.
