How 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 especially interested in the FPS levels I'm able achieve.

This is a difficult question to answer, as it all 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 enough good to play vanilla Minecraft at high enough FPS. For the most part, there shouldn't be any noticeable difference in smoothness.

First, a brief description of the system I used to run these tests. I have the M1 Mac Mini with 16gb Ram. It's connected via an LG Ultrafine5k LCD so the Mac is driving continuously regardless how large the Minecraft window. I ran these tests with Minecraft running and Activity Monitor to see the CPU/GPU usage. I will assume that you are playing the game and not streaming. I would expect performance to be the same if you have an M1mac with 8gb 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. If this happens, you can reduce your resolution or reduce the render distance to get around it. This is especially true for the entry-level Macbook Air that has only 7 cores and a binned GPU.

A game like Minecraft is best played at 60fps. The game looks smoother above 45fps. I haven't noticed any difference between the lower settings. 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.

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 will be coming later this 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 show up in your menu. However, it will warn you that activating it can cause the game to crash. 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 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.

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

The first question you should ask is whether you're using Minecraft in full-screen mode. By default, the app will run windowed on a Mac and always set itself 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 strange, but the window size is what you use to determine the resolution of your game. This means that the performance you get will depend on how big your window is.

Moom is an app that allows you to define pre-sets to scale windows. See below for details on how to set up Moom if you are interested.

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 also recording or streaming then I step that down to 2560x1440 (2k, or 1280x720 pt on a @2x screen).

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.

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 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 monitor sizes are 1080, 1440 (2k), and 2160 (4k). I have a 5k display (2880) and I'll test all these resolutions both windowed and full-screen on this monitor.

My computer is 20 inches/50cm away. Full-screen games in 1st person make me motion sick. 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. You are free to judge.

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

Resolution

1080 (HD). Average frame rates between 40-45 FPS. As you would expect from a lower resolution, the gameplay is smooth. No issues running Minecraft at this resolution.

2560x1440 (2k/MacBook screen) Frame rates on average between 40-45 fps. The averages were actually the same as the 1080 test, resulting in buttery smooth gameplay, which was surprising! I did however see the highest peaks go higher at 1080 (fps peaked in the 90's at 1080, whereas the max at 2k was in the 70's), but you won't notice a thing. I also tested the 2560x1600 13-inch MacBook monitor resolution separately and found no difference in the numbers.

3840x2160 (4k) Frame rates on average between 30-35 fps. A 20-25% decrease in performance at this resolution. This is not buttery smooth but it's very playable for a game like Minecraft. This is quite impressive considering there are 2k more pixels to push. It is still playable at this speed, but it gets a little choppy when there's too much going on at once. You can play Minecraft on a. 4k screen at 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 at this speed was unable to handle a frame rate of 5k. It was impossible to play the game because of the low frame rate. This is 5x the amount of pixels that 1080 has, and most people don’t have 5k screens. 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 extremely well. No matter if you're using the MacBook Air or MacBook Pro to play on, or plugged into any one of the most common monitor sizes, you should be able to play as you please.

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 long for a Mac GPU that supports Ray Tracing, just like the RTX series 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. #

Minecraft settings These are the setting I used to perform these tests. The render distance is set to 16 chunks and almost everything has been turned to the maximum.

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 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. 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. Also, you must add 30pt to the vertical (second) number to account for the window bar. These sizes are shown below:

- 1080: 965x570 - 2k : 1280x750 4k : 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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