It shows how little vanilla Minecraft uses the GPU and is a mostly CPU-bound game. Interestingly the M2 performed 23% better than the M1, getting very close performance numbers to the M1 Max, which was surprising. Tests in vanilla Minecraft in a brand-new world gave some interesting results: We’ll spin up a brand new world from scratch we’ll start there and let’s see how all three of these machines do in that scenario then we’ll log back onto NeueCraft and see how it performs on the server. I’ll also be testing with OptiFine because in my experience OptiFine makes one of the biggest differences in performance that you can get in Minecraft. I’m going to be testing all of this in the native Minecraft launcher both with completely vanilla Minecraft as it comes out of the box with all the settings turned to maximum, with render and simulation distance both at 12 chunks. I’m going to test all three of these machines that are the same resolution of 2560x1600, as if you’re not running shaders then I’ve found in the past resolution plays a minimal role in affecting performance. I always like to test in a fresh new empty world and then a very populated server like my own SMP NeueCraft, as these two often give the biggest variance in performance. We are going to compare specifically how different worlds perform. I have three Macs to test with today I have an M1 MacBook Pro (a standard M1, no Pro/Max), I have an M1 Max maxed out Max studio, and I also have an M2 MacBook Air.

Comparing an M1 to an M2 mac on paper - the GPU is what’s changed the most. I’ve done a lot of testing over the years that has helped me learn that Minecraft is mostly a CPU-bound game, but depending on the graphic settings you decide to apply the GPU comes into effect a fair amount.

Yes, I’m one of those people and I’ve tested Minecraft and the way it behaves on Macs quite a lot over the years and that’s what I’m going to do today with a combination of the M1s and the M2s to see how they perform and how things have changed since the 1.19 update now that we have native ARM support for Apple silicon in Minecraft.

JanuHow well does Minecraft 1.19 run on an M2 Mac? It is worth using Optifine?

Minecraft shaders for mac