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 questions in the comments of my Let's Play YouTube video series - how does Minecraft run 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 do my best and test the most common scenarios so you have an idea of what kind of numbers to expect.
It's easy to answer: vanilla Minecraft runs at high enough FPS. Most importantly, your gameplay should be smooth.
First, a brief description of the system I used to run these tests. I have an 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 performed these tests with only Minecraft running and Activity Monitor so I can see the CPU and GPU usage. I'm going assume that you're playing 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. 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 when you have a Macbook Air entry-level with 7 cores.
With a game like Minecraft, any more than 60fps is a bit pointless. I find the game runs smoothly above 45fps and there is little to no difference thereafter. In these benchmarks, we are ideally aiming for 45fps+.
There are many settings to choose from and your computer setup can have a huge impact on how fast your M1 Mac runs.
A small caveat at the time of writing in February 2021 - Minecraft is not yet optimised 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.
We'll assume that there are many settings so we will not change any of them. The only setting unavailable to M1 Mac users today is making graphics quality set to 'Fabulous'. It does show up in the menu and gives you a warning - do not activate it as it simply crashes the game. You will have to accept what they call "Fancy", which I find enough.
Below is a full list of the settings that I used for these tests.
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 currently running 1.16. I'd be very surprised if it ran differently. They seem to be focusing mostly on new world heights and materials - there are some things I really look forward to, but not enough to make us believe that performance will get worse.
These same tests were also done using Optifine, if you are interested.
First, ask yourself if you are using Minecraft full-screen or windowed. The default setting for the app is to run windowed on a Mac.
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 seem strange, but you define the game resolution based on that window size. This means the performance you're able to get will depend on how large you make that 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.
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.
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 your laptop screen is 13 inches or less, you can go full-screen. Mincecrafting will require you to use every pixel of that view to fill the small space.
The size, resolution, and personal preference of the external display will all affect how it works.
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.
External displays will vary in their capabilities. The most common sizes of monitors are 1080, 1440 (2k), or 2160 (4k). I have a 5k display (2880), and I will test all these resolutions windowed or full-screen on it.
My computer screen is only 20 inches/50 cm away from my eyes, so full-screen games in first-person make me 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. You are free to judge.
These tests were performed with Minecraft running only.
Resolution tests
1080 (HD). Average frame rates between 40-45 FPS. Super smooth gameplay, as you would expect for a lower resolution like this. No issues running Minecraft at this resolution.
2560x1440 (2k/MacBook Screen) Frame rates average between 40 and 45 fps. Alusky's Blog The average frame rates were the same as the 1080 test. This resulted is a buttery smooth 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 rate averages between 30-35 fps. A 20-25% decrease 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. It's not bad considering there are almost twice as many pixels 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 could also 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 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. Keep in mind that this is five times the number of pixels as 1080 and that most people don't 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 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 Java and Minecraft are optimized in the future. This should in theory give us a significant boost in performance and allow us more render distances and higher resolutions. I dream of a Mac GPU capable of Ray Tracing similar to the RTX Nvidia card.
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 demonstrating the same tests with Optifine. #
These are the settings I used to run these tests in Minecraft. 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 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. I use it to set the window resolutions 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.
Bear in mind these are points (pt), so on a retina screen, you need to half the numbers. Also, you must add 30pt to the vertical (second) number to account for the window bar. These sizes are shown below:
- 1080: 960x570 - 2k: 1280x750 - 4k: 1920 x 1110
Get the Moom app.
If you like the look of the world I created, subscribe and follow along on my let's play series. I recently made a world tour video showing everything I've achieved so far.
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