How Well 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 my in the comments on my Let's Play YouTube channel - how does Minecraft work on M1 Macs. MINECRAFT SERVERS LIST People are especially interested in the FPS levels I'm able achieve.
This is not an easy question to answer since it depends on the 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 quick overview of my setup for 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 assume that you're playing and not streaming. Performance isn't going to be different if you have an M1 Mac with 8gb RAM.
The M1 MacBook Air may experience a drop in performance after prolonged gaming, especially if the game is run on an external 4k display at native resolution. The is due to the fact it does not have a fan to cool itself down like the Mini and the MacBook Pro. If this happens, you can reduce your resolution or reduce the render distance to get around it. 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. I find the game runs smoothly above 45fps and there is little to no difference thereafter. These benchmarks suggest that we should aim 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 isn’t yet optimized for ARM so I’m assuming Mojangs hands have been tidied. I hope this will change later in the year.
There are many settings. We will assume that you want maximum details because of this. M1 Mac users can only set graphics quality to 'Fabulous'. It does appear in the menu, but it warns you to not activate it. It will crash the game. You'll have to live with "Fancy" in the meantime. Personally, I find that fancy enough.
Below is a full listing of the settings I used in these tests.
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.
If you're interested, I also conducted these same tests using Optifine.
First, ask yourself if you are using Minecraft full-screen or windowed. 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 strange, but you define the game resolution based on that window size. This means that the performance you can get will depend upon how large your window is.
Moom allows you to set up pre-sets for scaling 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 on 3840x2160 (4k), or 1920x1080 pixels pt on an @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.
It will depend on the size and resolution of your external display, as well as your personal preference.
You can adjust the resolution to make it scaled when running it full-screen. 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.
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. 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 ;)
I did these tests with only Minecraft running, everything else was closed.
Resolution
1080 (HD). Frame rates average between 40 and 45 fps. You will experience smooth gameplay at this lower resolution. No issues running Minecraft at this resolution.
2560x1440 (2k/MacBook monitor) Frame rates in the average range of 40-45 frames per second. 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-inch MacBook monitor resolution separately and found no difference in the numbers.
3840x2160 (4k). Frame rates on average between 30-35 frames per second. A 20-25% decrease in performance at this resolution. This is not buttery smooth but it's very playable for a game like Minecraft. It's not bad considering there are almost twice as many pixels as 2k. It's still playable at this frame rate, but it can get a little slow if there are too many things happening at once. You can play Minecraft on a. 4k screen in native resolution. But you cannot record or do anything else at the same time.
5120x2880 (5k). Frame rates on average between 25 and 28 fps. Minecraft running in emulation with this setting ran at 5k frames. This exceeded the limit of what the M1 GPU could do. It was not playable because the frame rate was always too low. Keep in mind that this is five times the number of pixels as 1080 and that 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 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 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 supporting Ray Tracing like we see on the RTX series of 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 and video showing the same tests when using Optifine. #
These are the settings I used to run these tests in Minecraft. 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, a menu bar app that hijacks a green button in your window bar, is a great option. It allows users to pin the screen edges, preferred sizes, and 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 app, add a view and set it to resize. Type in the dimensions.
These are points (pt), so you will need to reduce the number by half on a retina screen. To account the window bar, you must also add 30pt onto the vertical (second number). These sizes are shown below:
- 1080: 965x570 - 2k : 1280x750 4k : 1920x1110
Download the Moom application.
Subscribe to my let's-play series if you like the look of my world. I recently made a world tour video showing everything I've achieved so far.
Now read this
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