Minecraft wiki entry for Chunk, associated text: In singleplayer, the chunk loading distance is one less than the render distance, as configured in Options. It follows the formula (2r - 3)2 = AoC where r is the selected render distance, and AoC is the area of chunks that are assigned an original player ticket (level 31 - entity ticking). The minimum AoC is 9, which means that there is no difference between having the render distance set to 2 or 3.