Notes

How Well Does Minecraft Run On An M1 Mac?

How well does Minecraft work 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? Specifically, people are interested in the FPS I'm able to get.



That's not a simple question to answer as it depends on your setup. So I'll do my best to test the most common scenarios people will have and give you an idea of the kind of numbers you should expect to see.



It is good enough to play vanilla Minecraft at high enough FPS. You shouldn't notice any lag in your gameplay.



First, let me tell you a bit about the setup I used to conduct 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'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 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. This is because it doesn't have a fan to cool down like the Mini or the 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. The game looks smoother above 45fps. I haven't noticed any difference between the lower settings. These benchmarks are ideal 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.



A small caveat at the time of writing in February 2021 - Minecraft is not yet optimised for M1 Macs/ARM. Java itself isn’t optimized for ARM yet. I assume that Mojangs hands are still tiling. I hope that this will change in the coming months.



Because there are so many settings, we're going to work on the assumption here that we want all the details on maximum. M1 Mac users cannot change graphics quality to Fabulous'. It does appear in the menu, but it warns you to not activate it. It will crash the game. You will have to accept what they call "Fancy", which I find enough.



Full list of the setting I used for these tests below.



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 focus on vanilla Minecraft un-modified, which runs exactly the same way you would find it if downloaded from Mojang today. I'm using the most recent release 1.16. Although 1.17 is not far away, I would be amazed if it runs any different. They seem mostly to be focusing mainly on new materials and world heights. There are a few things there that I really enjoy, but nothing that could lead us to assume performance might get better or worse.



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



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: If you run your game in a window, the resolution at which it will run is determined by the size of the window. This may sound odd, but it is how you set the game resolution. This means that the performance of your game will depend on the size of your window.



There are apps like Moom that allow you to define a list of pre-sets to scale windows to (amongst other great features). If you are interested in learning more about how to set Moom up, please refer to the following.



As far as I can tell, windowed runs this app at the resolution (in pixels not points), so with Macs that's a 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 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.



If you're using an external display it's going to depend on the monitor size, resolution and your personal preference.



If you run it full-screen you can set the resolution independently to render scaled in the display settings of the game. Full-screen mode allows for unlimited resolutions, up to the maximum supported by your monitor.



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.



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 may have a smaller monitor or be sitting further away, so it might work well for you to go full-screen on your external display. No judgement ;)



I did these tests with only Minecraft running, everything else was closed.



Resolution



1080 (HD). Frame rates are on average between 40-40 fps. As you would expect from a lower resolution, the gameplay is smooth. Minecraft runs flawlessly at this resolution.



2560x1440 (2k/MacBook monitor) Frame rates in the average range of 40-45 frames per second. The averages were actually the same as the 1080 test, resulting in buttery smooth gameplay, which was surprising! 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 inch MacBook monitor resolution, but found no difference.



3840x2160 (4k). Frame rates average between 30-35 FPS. A 20-25% drop in performance at this resolution. I wouldn't call this buttery smooth, but it's very playable with almost no major degradation in gameplay for a game like Minecraft. Not bad considering there are twice as many pixels to push as 2k. The game can still be played at this fps. It just becomes a bit choppy if too much is happening at once. If you wanted yo could play Minecraft on a. 4k screen at native resolution and get away with it. But you cannot record or do anything else at the same time.



5120x2880 (5k). Frame rate on average between 25-30 fps. Minecraft running in emulation with this setting ran at 5k frames. This exceeded the limit of what the M1 GPU could do. The frame rate was consistently too low to make it playable. This is five times as many pixels as 1080 and most people don't have 5k displays. I do have one, but it's only for work. It is overwhelming.



The M1 Macs run Minecraft extremely well. It doesn't matter if you play on a 13" MacBook Air, MacBook Pro or MacBook Pro. You can use the laptop screen or plug into any of the most popular monitor sizes.



If you want to stream simultaneously, you will need to compromise on resolution and/or render distance in order to allow OBS to do its job.



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.



You can see a follow up on this video where I show you how to get more performance from the M1 by running Optifine, and fiddling around with those settings.



If you like what I have created, subscribe to my YouTube channel and see my let's go series where I build it all from scratch.



Check out my post & video showing the same tests that were done with Optifine. #



These are the settings I used to run these tests in Minecraft. With the render distance of 16 chunks set, almost everything is turned to maximum.



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 is a great little menu bar app that hijacks the green button in the window bar. It allows you pin screen edges and preferred sizes or locations. It is used to set the window resolutions I use for testing. It is also used regularly to set the windows to a standard video resolution. Add a new view to the Moon application, set it up to resize, and then type 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 listed below:

- 1080: 965x570 - 2k : 1280x750 4k : 1920x1110



Download the Moom app.



If you like the look of the world I created, subscribe and follow along on my let's play series. This is what awesome looks like I recently created a video of my world tour that shows everything I have achieved.



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