I must admit that I have not played Minecraft on any computer without a fast nVidia card. It could be the OpenGL driver that makes it slow in your case actually

I must admit that I have not played Minecraft on any computer without a fast nVidia card. It could be the OpenGL driver that makes it slow in your case actually. I am not sure that the graphics are "basic" in the technological sense - Yes, the graphics have a retro-pixel look and no fancy shader-tricks, but there are a lot of large views and a lot of surfaces, and no cheating with a world box.