How Well Does Minecraft Run On An M1 Mac?

How well does Minecraft run on an M1 Mac?

My M1 Mac mini has been my Minecraft server for the past few months. It works great!

Many people have been asking my in the comments on my Let''s Play YouTube channel - how does Minecraft work on M1 Macs. People are particularly interested in the FPS I can achieve.

This is not an easy question to answer since it depends on the setup. I''ll try my best to test the most common scenarios and give you an idea about the numbers you can expect to see.

It is enough good to play vanilla Minecraft at high enough FPS. For the most part, there shouldn''t be any noticeable difference in smoothness.

First, let me tell you a bit about the setup I used to conduct these tests. The M1 Mac mini has 16gb RAM. It is connected to an LG Ultrafine5k display so that the Mac is clearly driving regardless of how large the Minecraft window is. I tested these with Minecraft running only and Activity Monitor enabled to see the GPU and CPU usage. I''m going to assume you''re only playing and not recording or streaming for the time being. I wouldn''t expect performance to be any different if you have an M1 mac with 8gb of RAM.

If you have the M1 MacBook Air, then you might find after prolonged gameplay performance starts to drop a little, especially if you run the game on an external 4k display at native resolution. The is due to the fact it does not have a fan to cool itself down like the Mini and the MacBook Pro. If you do experience this then simply drop your resolution down a notch or knock off a few chunks off the render distance and you should be fine. This is especially true if your Macbook Air has 7 cores, or a lower-end Macbook Air with a binned graphics card.

For a game such as Minecraft, 60fps is quite absurd. The game looks smoother above 45fps. I haven''t noticed any difference between the lower settings. In these benchmarks, we are ideally aiming for 45fps+.

There are many settings that you can choose from, so your computer setup and how you run the game will have an impact on the performance of your M1 Mac.

One caveat: Minecraft is not yet optimized for M1 Macs/ARM at the time this article was written in February 2021. Java isn’t yet optimized for ARM so I’m assuming Mojangs hands have been tidied. I would hope that it will happen later in the year.

We''ll assume that there are many settings so we will not change any of them. M1 Mac users have one option: set graphics quality to "Fabulous". It does appear in the menu, but it warns you to not activate it. It will crash the game. In the meantime, you''ll have to make do with what they call ''Fancy'', and personally, I find that fancy enough.

Below is a full list of the settings that I used for these tests.

I''m going now to go through all the options and let you know what Minecraft can do on an M1 Mac.

I''ll be focusing on vanilla Minecraft. It will run the same way as you would if it were downloaded from Mojang. I''m currently running 1.16. I''d be very surprised if it ran differently. They seem to be focusing mostly on new world heights and materials - there are some things I really look forward to, but not enough to make us believe that performance will get worse.

If you''re interested, I also conducted these same tests using Optifine.

First, ask yourself if you are using Minecraft full-screen or windowed. The default windowed mode of the app is set to run on a Mac. It will also default to a strange default size.

Windowed When you run your game windowed the resolution at the game will be set is the size of the window. This may sound odd, but it is how you set the game resolution. This means the performance you''re able to get will depend on how large you make that window.

Moom allows you to set up pre-sets for scaling windows. See below for details on how to set up Moom if you are interested.

From what I can tell, windowed runs the app at the resolution in pixels not points, so with Macs that''s natively a 2X retina density.

I run my game windowed at 3840x2160 (4k, or 1920x1080 pt on a @2x screen). If I''m streaming or recording, I reduce that to 2560x1440 (2k or 1280x720 pixels pt on @2x screen).

Full-screen: If you have a laptop screen, full-screen will be the best option. You only have 13 inches to work with and you need all the pixels to fill that small area with Mincecrafting.

The size, resolution, and personal preference of the external display will all affect how it works.

Full-screen mode allows you the option to set the resolution independent of the game. In full-screen mode you can target any number of resolutions up to the maximum your monitor can support.
360 degrees all the way around

It will depend on the display''s capabilities if you are using an external monitor. The most common sizes of monitors are 1080, 1440 (2k), or 2160 (4k). I have a 5k monitor (2880) and will test all resolutions on this monitor, both full-screen and windowed.

Personally, when playing at my computer my eyes are only 20 inches/50cm away from my 28-inch screen, so full-screen games in first person make me feel motion sick. You might have a smaller or further away monitor so it might work for you to go full screen on your external display. Please don''t judge.

These tests were conducted with Minecraft running.

Resolution

1080 (HD). Frame rates average between 40 and 45 fps. You will experience smooth gameplay at this lower resolution. Minecraft runs smoothly at this resolution.

2560x1440 (2k/MacBook display) Frame rates between 40-45 FPS. The average frame rates were the same as the 1080 test. This resulted is a buttery smooth gameplay. However, I did notice that the highest peak speeds were higher at 1080 (fps peaked at 90 fps at 1080, while the maximum at 2k was at 70 fps), but it''s not noticeable. I also tested out the 2560x1600 13” MacBook monitor resolution but did not notice any difference.

3840x2160 (4k). Frame rate averages between 30-35 fps. This resolution causes a drop in performance of between 20 and 25%. I wouldn''t call this buttery smooth, but it''s very playable with almost no major degradation in gameplay for a game like Minecraft. This is a good result considering that there are twice the number of pixels to push than 2k. The game is still playable at this fps, it just gets a little choppy if there''s a lot happening on screen at once. If you wanted yo could play Minecraft on a. 4k screen at native resolution and get away with it. You cannot record or do other things simultaneously.

5120x2880 (5k). Frame rates average between 25-28 frames per second. Minecraft running in emulation at this speed was unable to handle a frame rate of 5k. The frame rate was too low to make it playable. Bear in mind this is 5 times the numbers of pixels as 1080, and most people do not have 5k displays. I do (for work purposes) and I don''t want to game full-screen on it as I find it overwhelming.

In summary The M1 Macs run Minecraft really well. You can play Minecraft on any size monitor, whether you are using the 13" MacBook Air or MacBook Pro with the laptop screen, or plugging into any other common monitor sizes.

You will need to compromise on the resolution or render distance if you want to simultaneously stream and record. This is because OBS power tools such as OBS can''t do their jobs simultaneously.

I hope a future optimisation of Java and Minecraft do come that in theory should give us a pretty significant boost in performance, allowing us to push higher resolutions and render distances even further. I dream of a Mac GPU that supports Ray Tracing just like the RTX Nvidia cards.

If you''d like to see a follow-up on this where I show how you can eek more performance out of the M1 by running Optifine and fiddling with those settings - let me know in the comments of my YouTube video.

If you like the video and the look of the world, please subscribe and check out my let''s build series.

Check out my post and video showing the same tests when using Optifine. #

Minecraft settings These are the setting I used to perform these tests. Almost everything is turned to the maximum, with the render distance set to 16 chunks.

Fullscreen resolution: (See above) Graphics: Fancy Smooth lighting: Maximum VSync: Off Render distance 16 chunks Max frame rate: Unlimited Clouds: Fast (fancy clouds really don''t look better IMO) Fullscreen: up to you - see above Particles: All Entity shadows: On

Moom settings Moom hijacks the green menu button in the windowbar to create a small menu bar app called Moom. It allows you to pin your screen edges or preferred sizes and places. It allows me to set the window sizes that I use to test. It is also used to set the window size to a standard resolution and ratio for OBS recording. You can add a new view in the Moon application.

- 1080x570 - 2kx1280x750 – 4kx 1920x1110

Get the Moom app.

Subscribe to my let’s play series if the world you see is appealing to your eyes. I recently created a video of my world tour that shows everything I have achieved.

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