Notes

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 asked me in the comments about my Let's Play YouTube YouTube series: How does Minecraft perform on M1 Macs. People are particularly interested in the FPS I can achieve.



It's not an easy question to answer because it 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.



The simple answer is: it plenty good enough to play vanilla Minecraft at high enough FPS, and for the most part, you shouldn't notice any lack of smoothness in your gameplay.



First, a little about my setup that I used to perform these tests. I have the M1 Mac Mini with 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. These tests were done with Activity Monitor and Minecraft running. This allows me to 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. Games 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 you have the entry-level Macbook Air with binned GPU that only has 7 cores.



With a game like Minecraft, any more than 60fps is a bit pointless. This game runs smoother than 45fps, and I don't see any noticeable difference thereafter. These benchmarks are ideal 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 optimised for ARM yet, so until that's is done I'm assuming Mojangs hands are tided. I hope this will change later in the year.



Because there are so many settings, we're going to work on the assumption here that we want all the details on maximum. The only setting unavailable to M1 Mac users today is making graphics quality set to 'Fabulous'. It does appear in the menu. You'll have a choice between 'Fancy' and what they call, which I find sufficient.



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



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



I'll focus on vanilla Minecraft, un-modded, running the same as you would find it if you downloaded it from Mojang yourself 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.



These same tests were also done using Optifine, if you are interested.



Ask yourself whether you're using Minecraft fullscreen or windowed. The default version of the app runs windowed on Macs and has a strange default screen size.



Windowed If your game is windowed, the resolution at that window will determine the resolution at it will run. This may sound odd, but it is how you set the game resolution. This means that the performance you can get will depend upon how large your window is.



Moom, among other great features, allows you to create a list of pre-sets that will scale windows. See below for details on how to set up Moom if you are interested.



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



Full-screen If you are using a laptop with 13" of screen, it is best to go full-screen. This means that you only have 13", and you will need to use all the pixels to fill in that small view with Mincecrafting.



It will depend on the size and resolution of your external display, as well as your personal preference.



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.



If you're using an external display, it's going to depend on what that display is capable of. The most common sizes of monitors are 1080, 1440 (2k), or 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. It may be possible that you have a smaller screen or are further away. In these cases, it might be a good idea to go full-screen on an external display. No judgment ;)



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



Resolution tests



1080 (HD). Frame rates average between 40 and 45 fps. As you would expect from a lower resolution, the gameplay is smooth. Minecraft runs smoothly 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 rate averages between 30-35 fps. This resolution results in a 20-25% performance drop. 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 can't record or do any other thing at the same time.



5120x2880 (5k). Frame rates average between 25-28 frames per second. Stepping up to 5k breached the limits of what the M1 GPU can do with Minecraft running in emulation like this. It was impossible to play the game because of the low frame rate. 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 there is a future optimization of Java and Minecraft that will give us a significantly higher performance. This should allow us to push higher resolutions, render further distances, and so on. I dream of a Mac GPU that supports Ray Tracing just like the RTX 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 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 & video showing the same tests that were done with Optifine. #



Minecraft settings These are the setting I used to perform these tests. 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 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 to set the window resolutions for testing. It is also used regularly to set the windows to a standard video resolution. You can add a new view in the Moon application.


Bear in mind these are points (pt), so on a retina screen, you need to half the numbers. To account for the window bar, you need to add 30pt on the vertical (second). These sizes are listed below:

- 1080x570 - 2kx1280x750 – 4kx 1920x1110



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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