How Does Minecraft Run On An M1 Mac

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

That's not a simple question to answer as it 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 good enough to play vanilla Minecraft at high enough FPS. You shouldn't notice any lag in your gameplay.

First, a quick overview of my setup for these tests. I have the M1 Mac mini with 16gb of 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. I ran these tests with Minecraft running and Activity Monitor to see the CPU/GPU usage. I assume that you are only playing and not streaming. I wouldn't expect performance to be any different if you have an M1 mac with 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. This is especially true when you have a Macbook Air entry-level with 7 cores.

A game like Minecraft is best played at 60fps. 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.

A small caveat at the time of writing in February 2021 - Minecraft is not yet optimised for M1 Macs/ARM. 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.

We'll assume that there are many settings so we will not change any of them. M1 Mac users cannot change graphics quality to Fabulous'. It does appear in the menu. You'll have a choice between 'Fancy' and what they call, which I find sufficient.

Below is a complete list of the settings I used to conduct 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 be focusing on vanilla Minecraft. gaming It will run the same way as you would if it were downloaded from Mojang. 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.

I did also performed these same tests using Optifine if you're 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 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 get will depend on how big 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.

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.

My game is windowed at 3840x2160 (4k) or 1920x1080 (pt on a @2x monitor). If I'm streaming or recording, I reduce that to 2560x1440 (2k or 1280x720 pixels pt on @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.

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. In full-screen mode you can target any number of resolutions up to the maximum your monitor can support.

If you're using an external display, it's going to depend on what that display is capable of. The most popular monitor sizes are 1080 (1.5k), 1440 (2k), & 2160 (4k). I have a 5k display (2880), and I will test all these resolutions windowed or full-screen on it.

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. gaming 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. Please don't judge.

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

Resolution

1080 (HD). Frame rates are on average between 40-40 fps. As you would expect from a lower resolution, the gameplay is smooth. Minecraft runs flawlessly 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 separately and found no difference in the numbers.

3840x2160 (4k). Frame rate averages between 30-35 fps. This resolution causes a drop in performance of between 20 and 25%. Although it isn't buttery smooth, it's very usable and almost no degradation in gameplay for a game such as 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 can play Minecraft on a. You can play Minecraft on a 4k screen at native resolution. You cannot record or do other things simultaneously.

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. The frame rate was too low to make it playable. Bear in mind this is 5 times the numbers of pixels as 1080, and most people do not have 5k displays. I do (for work purposes) and I don't want to game full-screen on it as I find it overwhelming.

The M1 Macs run Minecraft very well. You can play Minecraft on any size monitor, whether you are using the 13" MacBook Air or MacBook Pro with the laptop screen, or plugging into any other common 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 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 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 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 distance 16 chunks Max frame rate: Unlimited Clouds: Fast (fancy clouds really don't look better IMO) Fullscreen: up to you - see above Particles: All Entity shadows: On

Moom settings Moom, a menu bar app that hijacks a green button in your window bar, is a great option. It allows you to pin your screen edges or preferred sizes and places. 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. You can add a new view in the Moon application. gaming

Keep in mind that these numbers are points (pt), and you must use half of them on a retina display. To account the window bar, you must also add 30pt onto the vertical (second number). These sizes are listed below:

- 1080 x 960x570 – 2k: 1280x750–4k: 1920x1110

Get the Moom app.

Subscribe to my let's-play series if you like the look of my world. I recently created a video of my world tour that shows everything I have achieved.

Now, let's read this

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