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.
That's not a simple question to answer as it depends on your setup. I'll try my best to test the most common scenarios and give you an idea about the numbers you can expect to see.
It's easy to answer: vanilla Minecraft runs at high enough FPS. Most importantly, your gameplay should be smooth.
First, let me tell you a bit about the setup I used to conduct these tests. I have the M1 Mac mini with 16gb of Ram. It is connected to an LG Ultrafine5k display so that the Mac is clearly driving regardless of how large the Minecraft window is. I tested these with Minecraft running only and Activity Monitor enabled to see the GPU and CPU usage. I will assume that you are playing the game and not streaming. 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 due to the lack of a fan to cool it down, like the Mini and MacBook Pro. 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. MINECRAFT-SERVERS This is especially true if your Macbook Air has 7 cores, or a lower-end Macbook Air with a binned graphics card.
A game like Minecraft is best played at 60fps. 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 you can use, and your computer setup as well as how you run the game can impact the performance of your M1 Mac.
At the time of writing, February 2021, Minecraft was not optimized for M1 Macs/ARM. Java isn't yet optimised for ARM, so I assume Mojangs hands will be 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. M1 Mac users cannot change 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'll have to live with "Fancy" in the meantime. Personally, I find that fancy enough.
Full list of the setting I used for these tests below.
So now I'm going to run through all your options and let you know how far you can push Minecraft 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 currently using 1.16 and I'd be surprised if it runs differently. They seem to be focusing on new materials, world heights, and other things - there are a few things I'm looking forward to, but nothing to lead us to believe performance will get worse or better.
These same tests were also done using Optifine, if you are interested.
Ask yourself whether you're using Minecraft fullscreen or windowed. The default setting for the app is to run windowed on a Mac.
Windowed If you run your game windowed, the size you make the window is the resolution at which the game will run. 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 can get will depend upon how large your window is.
Moom is an app that allows you to define pre-sets to scale windows. If you are interested, see below for more information on how to set Moom up.
From what I can tell, windowed runs the app at the resolution in pixels not points, so with Macs that's natively a 2X retina density.
My game is windowed at 3840x2160 (4k) or 1920x1080 (pt on a @2x monitor). 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.
If you're using an external display it's going to depend on the monitor size, resolution and your personal preference.
You can adjust the resolution to make it scaled when running it full-screen. Full-screen mode allows for unlimited resolutions, up to the maximum supported by your monitor.
The capabilities of an external display will determine if it can be used. The most common monitor sizes include 1080, 1440 (2k), 2160 (4k), and 3840 (3k). I have a 5k display (2880) and I'll test all these resolutions both windowed and full-screen on this monitor.
My computer screen is only 20 inches/50 cm away from my eyes, so full-screen games in first-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. Please don't judge.
These tests were conducted with Minecraft running.
Resolution
1080 (HD). Average frame rates between 40-45 FPS. Super smooth gameplay, as you would expect for a lower resolution like this. Minecraft runs flawlessly 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. However, I did notice that the highest peak speeds were higher at 1080 (fps peaked at 90 fps at 1080, while the maximum at 2k was at 70 fps), but it's not noticeable. I also tested the 2560x1600 13-inch MacBook monitor resolution separately and found no difference in the numbers.
3840x2160 (4k). Frame rate averages between 30-35 fps. A 20-25% decrease in performance at this resolution. 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. The game can still be played at this fps. It just becomes a bit choppy if too much is happening at once. You can play Minecraft on a. 4k screen in native resolution. You can't record or do any other thing at the same time.
5120x2880 (5k) Frame rates on average between 25-28 fps. Minecraft running in emulation at this speed was unable to handle a frame rate of 5k. 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 have one, but it's only for work. It is overwhelming.
The M1 Macs run Minecraft 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 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 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.
If you'd like to see a follow-up on this where I show how you can eek more performance out of the M1 by running Optifine and fiddling with those settings - let me know in the comments of my YouTube video.
If you like the look of the world I showed in the video - please subscribe and watch my let's play series where I build that world from scratch.
Check out my post & video showing the same tests that were done with Optifine. #
These are the settings that I used to test these settings 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 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 is an excellent little menu bar app which hijacks the green button on the window bar. It allows users to pin the screen edges, preferred sizes, and locations. It allows me to set the window sizes that I use to test. I also use it regularly to set the window size to a standard video resolution and ratio ready for recording in OBS. 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 bars, you will need to add 30pt to your vertical (second) number. These sizes are as follows:
- 1080 x 960x570 – 2k: 1280x750–4k: 1920x1110
Get the Moom app.
Subscribe to my let’s play series if the world you see is appealing to your eyes. I recently made a world tour video showing everything I've achieved so far.
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