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How Well Does Minecraft Run On An M1 Mac?

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 me questions in the comments of my Let's Play YouTube video series - how does Minecraft run on M1 Macs. People are specifically interested in the FPS that I can get.

This is not an easy question to answer since it depends on the 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 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 quick overview of my setup for these tests. I have the M1 Mac Mini with 16gb Ram. It's connected via an LG Ultrafine5k LCD so the Mac is driving continuously regardless how large the Minecraft window. I ran these tests with Minecraft running and Activity Monitor to see the CPU/GPU usage. I'm going assume that you're playing and not streaming. I would expect performance to be the same if you have an M1mac 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 when you have a Macbook Air entry-level with 7 cores.

A game like Minecraft is best played at 60fps. This game runs smoother than 45fps, and I don't see any noticeable difference thereafter. These benchmarks are ideal for 45fps+.

There are many settings you can use, and your computer setup as well as how you run the game can impact the performance of your M1 Mac.

A caveat, Minecraft is still not optimised for M1 Macs/ARM as of February 2021. Java itself isn't optimised for ARM yet, so until that's is done I'm assuming Mojangs hands are tided. I would hope that will be coming later this 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 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 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 will concentrate on vanilla Minecraft, unmodified. It runs the same as if you downloaded it directly from Mojang. I'm using the most recent release 1.16. Although 1.17 is not far away, I would be amazed if it runs any different. They seem mostly to be focusing mainly on new materials and world heights. There are a few things there that I really enjoy, but nothing that could lead us to assume performance might get better or 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 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 in learning more about how to set Moom up, please refer to the following.

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.

I run my game windowed to 3840x2160 (4k or 1920x1080 on a @2x display). 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 have a laptop screen, full-screen will be the best option. You only have 13 inches to work with and you need all the pixels to fill that small area 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 popular monitor sizes are 1080 (1.5k), 1440 (2k), & 2160 (4k). I have a 5k display (2880) and I'll test all these resolutions both windowed and full-screen on this monitor.

Personally, when playing at my computer my eyes are only 20 inches/50cm away from my 28-inch screen, so full-screen games in first person make me feel motion sick. You might have a smaller or further away monitor so it might work for you to go full screen on your external display. You are free to judge.

These tests were conducted with Minecraft running.
minecraft servers

Resolution tests

1080 (HD). Frame rates average between 40 and 45 fps. As you would expect from a lower resolution, the gameplay is smooth. This resolution is perfect for Minecraft.

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. 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 out the 2560x1600 13” MacBook monitor resolution but did not notice any difference.

3840x2160 (4k). Frame rate averages between 30-35 fps. A 20-25% decrease in performance at this resolution. Although it isn't buttery smooth, it's very usable and almost no degradation in gameplay for a game such as Minecraft. This is quite impressive considering there are 2k more pixels to push. 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 can't record or do any other thing 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. The frame rate was consistently too low to make it playable. This is five times as many pixels as 1080 and 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 well. No matter if you're using the MacBook Air or MacBook Pro to play on, or plugged into any one of the most common monitor sizes, you should be able to play as you please.

If you want to stream simultaneously, you will need to compromise on resolution and/or render distance in order to allow OBS to do its job.

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. minecraft servers I dream of a Mac GPU that supports Ray Tracing just like the RTX Nvidia cards.

If you'd like to see a follow-up on this where I show how you can eek more performance out of the M1 by running Optifine and fiddling with those settings - let me know in the comments of my YouTube video.

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 demonstrating the same tests with Optifine. #

These are the settings that I used to test these settings in Minecraft. With the render distance of 16 chunks set, almost everything is turned to maximum.

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 users to pin the screen edges, preferred sizes, and locations. I use it here to set the window resolutions that 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. Add a new view to the Moon application, set it up to resize, and then type 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 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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