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. Specifically, people are interested in the FPS I'm able to get.
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 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 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'm going to assume you're only playing and not recording or streaming for the time being. Performance isn't going to be different if you have an M1 Mac with 8gb RAM.
The M1 MacBook Air might experience performance drops after prolonged gaming, especially when the game is played on an external 4k screen 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 for the entry-level Macbook Air that has only 7 cores and a binned GPU.
It is absurd to expect Minecraft to run at 60fps. 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 caveat, Minecraft is still not optimised for M1 Macs/ARM as of February 2021. Java itself isn’t optimized for ARM yet. I assume that Mojangs hands are still tiling. I would hope that it will happen later in the 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. In the meantime, you'll have to make do with what they call 'Fancy', and 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 will concentrate on vanilla Minecraft, unmodified. It runs the same as if you downloaded it directly 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.
If you are interested, I also did these tests with Optifine.
The first question to ask if you're using Minecraft windowed or full-screen. 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 windowed, the size you make the window is the resolution at which the game will run. 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). 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.
My game is windowed at 3840x2160 (4k) or 1920x1080 (pt on a @2x monitor). If I'm streaming or recording then I lower that to 2560x1440 (2k) or 1280x720 on a @2x monitor.
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.
It will depend on the size and resolution of your external display, as well as your personal preference.
Full-screen mode allows you the option to set the resolution independent of the game. In full-screen mode you can target any number of resolutions up to the maximum your monitor can support.
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 monitor (2880) and will test all resolutions on this monitor, both full-screen and windowed.
My computer is 20 inches/50cm away. Full-screen games in 1st 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. No judgment ;)
These tests were conducted with Minecraft running.
Resolution tests
1080 (HD) Frame rates on average 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 display) Frame rates 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" MacBook monitor resolution independently but saw no difference in the numbers.
3840x2160 (4k). Frame rates on average between 30-35 frames per second. A 20-25% drop 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. The game is still playable at this fps, it just gets a little choppy if there's a lot happening on screen 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.
MINECRAFT SERVERS
5120x2880 (5k) Frame rates on average between 25-28 fps. The limits of Minecraft running in emulation mode like this were exceeded when the frame rate was increased to 5k. It was impossible to play the game because of the low frame rate. 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 (for work purposes) and I don't want to game full-screen on it as I find it overwhelming.
The M1 Macs run Minecraft 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 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.
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 look of my world in the video, please subscribe to my let's-play series where I create it from scratch.
Check out my post and video demonstrating the same tests with Optifine. #
These are the settings that I used to test these settings in Minecraft. Almost everything is turned to the maximum, with the render distance set to 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 the screen edges or preferred sizes and locations. It allows me to set the window sizes that I use to test. It is also useful to set the window size and video resolution to be used for OBS recording. In the Moon app, add a view and set it to resize. Type in the dimensions.
Keep in mind that these are points (pt), so for a retina screen you will need to use half the numbers. To account for the window bar, you need to add 30pt on the vertical (second). These sizes are listed below:
- 1080x570 - 2kx1280x750 – 4kx 1920x1110
Download the Moom app.
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, take a look at this
WWDC 2019 keynote
Apple was firing on all the right cylinders this year. Clearly all that hiring they've been doing is starting to pay off. The keynote was presented at a rapid pace and almost everything that was announced was impressive and highly regarded. Many people were surprised by the announcements.
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