Keep in mind, Notch didn't write the java library that did his rendering, the light weight java gaming library or lwgl. It has reasonable performance and, as a

Keep in mind, Notch didn't write the java library that did his rendering, the light weight java gaming library or lwgl. It has reasonable performance and, as advertised, is lightweight. The key to minecraft is that it stylistically embraced a really blocky rendering style with low resolution textures. That made a game that could be very open vistas, be malleable and run on any modern device.