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 been asking my in the comments on my Let's Play YouTube channel - how does Minecraft work on M1 Macs. 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 brief description of the system I used to run these tests. I have an M1 Mac mini with 16GB of RAM. It's connected with an LG Ultrafine 5k monitor that shows the Mac driving continuously regardless of how big the Minecraft window is. These tests were done with Activity Monitor and Minecraft running. This allows me to see the CPU and GPU usage. I assume that you are only playing and not streaming. Performance isn't going to be different if you have an M1 Mac with 8gb RAM.
If you have an M1 MacBook Air, you might notice a decrease in performance after prolonged gameplay, especially if you are running the game on an external 4k monitor at native resolution. This is because it doesn't have a fan to cool down like the Mini or the 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 for the entry-level Macbook Air that has only 7 cores and a binned GPU.
A game like Minecraft is best played at 60fps. think of In my view, this game looks buttery smooth above 45fps and I struggle to notice any difference from there on up. These benchmarks are ideal for 45fps+.
There are a lot of settings to play with and both your computer setup and also how you decide the run the game can have a big effect on the performance you're able to get out 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 that this will change in the coming months.
There are many settings. We will assume that you want maximum details because of this. M1 Mac users have one option: set graphics quality 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'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.
I'm going to walk through all your options, and let you know how far Minecraft can be pushed 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 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.
I did also performed these same tests using Optifine if you're interested.
Ask yourself whether you're using Minecraft fullscreen or windowed. The default windowed mode of the app is set to run on a Mac. It will also default 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 sound odd, but it is how you set the game resolution. 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. For more information on setting up Moom, please see the below.
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 or recording then I lower that to 2560x1440 (2k) or 1280x720 on a @2x monitor.
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.
If you're using an external display it's going to depend on the monitor size, resolution and your personal preference.
If you run it full-screen you can set the resolution independently to render scaled in the display settings of the game. 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 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 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. You may have a smaller monitor or be sitting further away, so it might work well for you to go full-screen on your external display. No judgement ;)
These tests were conducted with Minecraft running.
Resolution
1080 (HD). Average frame rates between 40-45 FPS. You will experience smooth gameplay at this lower resolution. No issues running Minecraft at this resolution.
2560x1440 (2k/MacBook screen) Frame rates on average between 40-45 fps. 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 out the 2560x1600 13” MacBook monitor resolution but did not notice any difference.
3840x2160 (4k). Frame rates on average between 30-35 frames per second. This resolution causes a drop in performance of between 20 and 25%. I wouldn't call this buttery smooth, but it's very playable with almost no major degradation in gameplay for a game like Minecraft. This is a good result considering that there are twice the number of pixels to push than 2k. The game can still be played at this fps. It just becomes a bit choppy if too much is happening at once. If you wanted yo could play Minecraft on a. 4k screen at native resolution. You cannot record or do other things simultaneously.
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. The frame rate was consistently too low to make it playable. 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. 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 to record and stream at the same time, you will have to compromise on the resolution and/or render distance to accommodate for the power tools like OBS require to do their job at the same time.
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 supporting Ray Tracing like we see on the RTX series of Nvidia cards.
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 as well as the video that I made showing the same tests using Optifine. #
These settings are what I used for these tests. 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 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 you pin screen edges and preferred sizes or locations. I use it here to set the window resolutions that I use for testing. It is also useful to set the window size and video resolution to be used for OBS recording. You can add a new view in the Moon application.
These are points (pt), so you will need to reduce the number by half on a retina screen. 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.
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