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 me questions in the comments of my Let's Play YouTube video series - how does Minecraft run on M1 Macs. People are specifically interested in the FPS that I can get.

This is not an easy question to answer since it depends on the setup. I'll do my best and test the most common scenarios so you have an idea of what kind of numbers to expect.

It's easy to answer: vanilla Minecraft runs at high enough FPS. Most importantly, your gameplay should be smooth.

First, a quick overview of my setup for these tests. The M1 Mac mini has 16gb RAM. It's connected to an LG Ultrafine 5k display that the Mac is obviously driving continuously, regardless of the size of the window I run Minecraft in. I performed these tests with only Minecraft running and Activity Monitor so I can see the CPU and GPU usage. I'm going to assume you're only playing and not recording or streaming for the time being. I don't think performance will be any different if your M1 mac has 8gb of RAM.

If you have an M1 MacBook Air, you might notice a decrease in performance after prolonged gameplay, especially if you are running the game on an external 4k monitor 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. This can be fixed by lowering your resolution or reducing the render distance. This is especially true when you have a Macbook Air entry-level with 7 cores.

With a game like Minecraft, any more than 60fps is a bit pointless. 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 a lot of settings to play with and both your computer setup and also how you decide the run the game can have a big effect on the performance you're able to get out of your M1 Mac.

At the time of writing, February 2021, Minecraft was not optimized for M1 Macs/ARM. Java itself isn’t optimized for ARM yet. I assume that Mojangs hands are still tiling. I hope this will change later in the year.

There are many settings. We will assume that you want maximum details because of this. M1 Mac users have one option: set graphics quality to "Fabulous". It does show up in your menu. However, it will warn you that activating it can cause the game to crash. You will have to accept what they call "Fancy", which I find enough.

Below is a complete list of the settings I used to conduct these tests.

I'm going to walk through all your options, and let you know how far Minecraft can be pushed on an M1 Mac.

I will concentrate on vanilla Minecraft, unmodified. It runs the same as if you downloaded it directly from Mojang. I'm using the latest release 1.16, and although 1.17 is just around the corner, I would be surprised if it ran any differently - they seem to mostly be focussing on new materials and world heights - a few things in there I'm really looking forward to, but nothing that leads us to assume performance might get worse, or better.

I did also performed these same tests using Optifine if you're interested.

The first question you should ask is whether you're using Minecraft in full-screen mode. 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 seem strange, but you define the game resolution based on that window size. This means the performance you're able to get will depend on how large you make that window.

Moom, among other great features, allows you to create a list of pre-sets that will scale windows. For more information on setting up Moom, please see the below.

Windowed runs the app at resolution in pixels, not points, so for Macs it's natively a retina density of 2X.

I run my game windowed to 3840x2160 (4k or 1920x1080 on a @2x display). If I'm streaming or recording then I lower that to 2560x1440 (2k) or 1280x720 on a @2x monitor.

Full-screen If you're using a laptop screen, going full-screen is going to be the best setup as you only have 13" to play with - you need to use all those pixels to fill that small view 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. Full-screen mode lets you target any resolution up to the maximum resolution your monitor can handle.

It will depend on the display's capabilities if you are using an external monitor. The most popular monitor sizes are 1080 (1.5k), 1440 (2k), & 2160 (4k). I have a 5k screen (2880) that I will test all the resolutions, both full-screen as well as windowed.

My computer is 20 inches/50cm away. Full-screen games in 1st person make me 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. No judgment ;)

These tests were done with Minecraft only, all other programs were closed.

Resolution tests

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

2560x1440 (2k/MacBook monitor) Frame rates in the average range of 40-45 frames per second. It was actually the same averages as the 1080 test. This resulted in buttery smooth gameplay. The highest peaks did rise at 1080. However, the max at 2k was in 70's. But you won't notice any difference. I also tested the 2560x1600 13" MacBook monitor resolution independently but saw no difference in the numbers.

3840x2160 (4k) Frame rates on average between 30-35 fps. This resolution results in a 20-25% performance drop. It's not buttery smooth, but it's very user-friendly and has almost no gameplay degradation for a game as popular as Minecraft. Not bad considering there are twice as many pixels to push as 2k. It's still playable at this frame rate, but it can get a little slow if there are too many things happening at once. Minecraft Servers If you wanted yo could play Minecraft on a. 4k screen in native resolution. You cannot record or do other things simultaneously.

5120x2880 (5k). Frame rates on average between 25 and 28 fps. Minecraft running in emulation with this setting ran at 5k frames. This exceeded the limit of what the M1 GPU could do. It was not playable because the frame rate was always too low. Bear in mind this is 5 times the numbers of pixels as 1080, and most people do not have 5k displays. I do, but only for work. I find it overwhelming and don't want it to be full-screen gaming.

The M1 Macs run Minecraft very well. Whether you're playing on a 13" MacBook Air or MacBook Pro using the laptop screen or plugged into any of the most common monitor sizes - you should be fine to play however you want.

If you want both to record and stream simultaneously, you will need compromises on the resolution and/or render range to accommodate the OBS power tools that must do their job simultaneously.

I hope that Java and Minecraft will be optimized in the future. This should theoretically give us a significant performance boost and allow us to render at higher resolutions and further distances. I dream of a Mac GPU supporting Ray Tracing like we see on the RTX series of Nvidia cards.

If you'd like to see a continuation of this, where I show you how you can get more performance and out of your M1 by running Optifine.

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 demonstrating the same tests with Optifine. #

These are the settings that I used to test these settings in Minecraft. Nearly everything is turned up to the maximum with the render distance set at 16 chunks.

Fullscreen resolution: (See Above) Graphics : Fancy Smooth Lighting: Maximum VSync Off Render Distance 16 chunks Max framerate: Unlimited Clouds Fast (fancy clouds really do not look better IMO) Fullscreen : Up to you - See above Particles : All Entity shadows : On

Moom settings Moom, a menu bar app that hijacks a green button in your window bar, is a great option. It allows you pin screen edges and preferred sizes or locations. It is used to set the window resolutions I use for testing. I also use it regularly to set the window size to a standard video resolution and ratio ready for recording in OBS. You can add a new view in the Moon application.

Keep in mind that these numbers are points (pt), and you must use half of them on a retina display. To account for the window bar, you need to add 30pt on the vertical (second). These sizes are listed below:

- 1080: 960x570 - 2k: 1280x750 - 4k: 1920 x 1110

Download the Moom application.

If you like the way the world I created, subscribe to my let's go series. I recently made a world tour video showing everything I've achieved so far.

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