How Well Does Minecraft Run On An M1 Mac?

How 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 in the comments on my Let's Play YouTube series - how does Minecraft perform on M1 Macs? People are especially interested in the FPS levels I'm able achieve.

This is a difficult question to answer, as it all depends on your setup. I will try to test the most common scenarios that people have and give an indication of the type of numbers you should be expecting to see.

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

First, a little about my setup that I used to perform these tests. I have an M1 Mac mini with 16GB of RAM. It's connected with an LG Ultrafine 5k monitor that shows the Mac driving continuously regardless of how big the Minecraft window is. I performed these tests with only Minecraft running and Activity Monitor so I can see the CPU and GPU usage. I assume that you are only playing and not streaming. I wouldn't expect performance to be any different if you have an M1 mac with 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. It does not have a fan that cools it down like the Mini and MacBook Pro. This can be fixed by lowering your resolution or reducing the render distance. This is especially true if you have the entry-level Macbook Air with binned GPU that only has 7 cores.

For a game such as Minecraft, 60fps is quite absurd. In my view, this game looks buttery smooth above 45fps and I struggle to notice any difference from there on up. 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 itself isn't optimised for ARM yet, so until that's is done I'm assuming Mojangs hands are tided. 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 can only set graphics quality to 'Fabulous'. It does appear in the menu. 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 listing of the settings I used in these tests.

I'm going through all of your options and letting you know how far Minecraft can go 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 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.

If you are interested, I also did these tests with Optifine.

The first question to ask if you're using Minecraft windowed or full-screen. The default version of the app runs windowed on Macs and has a strange default screen 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 odd, but the size of the window determines the resolution at which your game will run. This means that the performance of your game will depend on the size of your window.

Moom allows you to set up pre-sets for scaling windows. If you are interested in learning more about how to set Moom up, please refer to the following.

According to what I can tell windowed runs it at the resolution of pixels and not points. So with Macs that's natively 2X retina density.

I run my game windowed to 3840x2160 (4k or 1920x1080 on a @2x display). 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.

External displays will vary based on the size of your monitor, resolution, and personal preference.

Full-screen mode allows you the option to set the resolution independent of the game. Full-screen mode allows you to target any resolution that your monitor supports.

External displays will vary in their capabilities. 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 eyes are only 20 inches/50cm from my 28-inch monitor, so I feel motion sick when playing full-screen games in the first person. You might have a smaller monitor, or you may be further away. If this is the case, it may work well for your external display to go fullscreen. No judgement ;)

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

Resolution

1080 (HD). Average frame rates between 40-45 FPS. You will experience smooth gameplay at this lower resolution. This resolution is perfect for Minecraft.

2560x1440 (2k/MacBook display) Frame rates between 40-45 FPS. The average frames were about the same as for the 1080 test. This resulted was a smooth and buttery gameplay. The highest peak peaks were higher at 1080. (fps peaked at 1080 in the 90's, while 2k at 2k was in a 70's), but that's about it. I also tested the 2560x1600 13" MacBook monitor resolution independently but saw no difference in the numbers.
Minecraft java

3840x2160 (4k). Frame rates average between 30-35 FPS. This resolution results in a 20-25% performance drop. Although it isn't buttery smooth, it's very usable and almost no degradation in gameplay for a game such as Minecraft. It's not bad considering there are almost twice as many pixels as 2k. The game can still be played at this fps. It just becomes a bit choppy if too much is happening at once. You could also play Minecraft on a. 4k screen at native resolution. But you can't record or do anything else 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 consistently 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 have one for work, and I don’t like to use it full-screen as it is too overwhelming.

The M1 Macs run Minecraft 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 to record and stream at the same time, you will have to compromise on the resolution and/or render distance to accommodate for the power tools like OBS require to do their job at the same time.

I hope Java and Minecraft are optimized in the future. This should in theory give us a significant boost in performance and allow us more render distances and higher resolutions. I long for a Mac GPU that supports Ray Tracing, just like the RTX series Nvidia cards.

You can watch a follow-up video in which I show how to get more performance out the M1 using Optifine and fiddling about with the settings.

If you like the look of my world in the video, please subscribe to my let's-play series where I create it from scratch.

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. 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 length 16 chunks. Max frame rate. Unlimited Clouds. Fast (fancy cloud really don't look any better IMO). Fullscreen: Up to You - see above Particles. All Entity shadows are: 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 the screen edges or preferred sizes and locations. I use it here to set the window resolutions that I use for testing. It is also used regularly to set the windows to a standard video resolution. In the Moon application add a new view, set it to resize and type in the dimensions.

These are points (pt), so you will need to reduce the number by half on a retina screen. To account for the window bar, you need to add 30pt on the vertical (second). These sizes are shown below:

- 1080x570 - 2kx1280x750 – 4kx 1920x1110

Get the Moom app.

If you like the way the world I created, subscribe to my let's go series. Recently, I made a video that shows all I have accomplished so far.

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