Guide

Minecraft shaders on M1, M2, M3 and M4: what to expect from each

By Ryleigh Newman · Published

Minecraft shaders on an Apple Silicon Mac run on the game's Vulkan backend with Rockstar Shaders, or on OpenGL through Iris, whose developers list Apple Silicon as not supported. What to expect from each chip is a question I can only answer honestly for one of them: I have measured Rockstar Shaders on exactly one machine, an M4 Max with 48 GB of unified memory, and nothing smaller has been tried. What follows is that measurement, what Apple says changes between M1, M2, M3 and M4, and the settings that trade pixels for time when a machine needs them.

I am Ryleigh Newman and I made Rockstar Shaders because I wanted shaders on a Mac that treated the Mac as the target rather than a driver to work around. Every fact about Apple's chips below comes from Apple's press releases and its Metal feature tables, read on 2026-09-19. Every frame time is from my machine at a named resolution, and none of them is a promise about yours.

Download free (1.0.0) Modrinth (pending)Minecraft 26.3, Fabric, macOS on Apple silicon. Install guide. Releases and bug reports on GitHub.

The one machine I have measured

An Apple M4 Max with 48 GB of unified memory, running MoltenVK 1.4.2. In the sunset bay scene, looking down at the water, the frame interval at 1708x960 was 34.3 to 35.7 ms after the 2026-09-19 performance pass, and at my full window of 1706x1966 it was 46.0 to 46.5 ms, which is 21.6 frames a second. That second number is the one to look at if your window is a similar size; a frame time only means something at the resolution it names.

Where the 1706x1966 frame goes: the water pass 8.7 to 8.9 ms, the terrain G-buffer 3.9, clouds 1.9, volumetrics 1.6, ray-traced reflection resolve 1.4, caustics 1.4, lighting 1.4, screen-space reflections 1.4, and the Metal shadow and sky traces, which run outside the GPU timers, 3.8. An older offline bench of the pack's passes alone, without the water surface and without the game's own geometry, ran 2.58 ms at 1280x720, 4.14 at 1920x1080, 6.54 at 2560x1440 and 12.90 at 3840x2160; 1440p is the size it was tuned at. The Show pass timings overlay prints the same breakdown live on your machine.

What Apple says changes from M1 to M4

Apple introduced the M1 on 10 November 2020 with up to eight GPU cores and a unified memory architecture, where the GPU and CPU share one pool. The M2 followed on 6 June 2022 with up to ten GPU cores and up to 24 GB of memory. The M3 family, announced on 30 October 2023, brought hardware-accelerated ray tracing and mesh shading to the Mac for the first time, in Apple's words. The M4 arrived on 7 May 2024, and the M4 Max in the MacBook Pro on 30 October 2024, with up to a 40-core GPU and up to 128 GB of memory.

Apple's Metal feature set tables put the M1 series in the Apple7 GPU family, the M2 in Apple8, and the M3 and M4 in Apple9, and they list ray tracing in compute and render pipelines as available from the Apple6 family. So the Metal ray tracing API that Rockstar Shaders calls exists on every Apple Silicon Mac; what changed with M3 is dedicated hardware to run it. How much that hardware is worth in a Minecraft frame I cannot tell you, because I have not measured a chip without it.

What that means on an M1 or M2

The ray tracing side-car needs a Metal device that reports ray tracing support, which Apple's tables say an M1 has, and the release target is Apple Silicon, M1 or later. The release notes say only that an M1 will be slower. I have no frame time for an M1, M2, M3 or plain M4, and any number I gave you would be made up.

Two things I do know from the M4 Max apply to a slower chip. First, the ray tracing is not the cost to cut: with everything on, the same pose took 27.9 ms; with ray-traced shadows off, 29.7; reflections off, 29.3; fog off, 29.3; all three off, 29.5. Every fallback costs more than the trace it replaces, and without the side-car enclosed spaces look veiled. Second, the water pass is the largest single cost, and it has knobs. The place to start on a slower machine is resolution, below, not the ray tracing switches.

Resolution is the biggest lever

Render scale renders the world at a fraction of the window's resolution and upscales it under a sharp GUI, with a nine-tap Catmull-Rom filter and a light sharpen. The default is 75%, which draws about half the pixels, and the choices run 50%, 58%, 67%, 75%, 83%, 92% and 100%. On the M4 Max at 1706x1966, 75% takes the frame from 44.98 to 33.95 ms, 11 ms, while any single quality knob is worth a few tenths. That is why 75% is the default and why it is the first thing to lower on a slower chip.

Target FPS is a governor: it steps the scale down on its own while the median frame time over a settled window misses the target, and back up when there is room, never above Render scale. It undoes a step that bought under 4%, waits 15 seconds after entering a world, and backs off for 30 seconds after a failed step, so a slow CPU never blurs the picture for nothing. The default is 20, a floor that never engages on a fast machine; the choices are Off, 20, 30, 45, 60, 90 and 120. MetalFX upscaling also exists, off by default and restart-only; I measured it losing detail on a panning shot, so Render scale is the supported way to trade pixels for speed.

The knobs worth tenths of a millisecond

Measured at 1706x1966 on the M4 Max, with the water pass at 8.67 to 8.84 ms as the baseline: Screen reflections off, 7.81; Detail rungs 0, 8.02; Wave octaves 4, 8.20; Parallax steps 0, 8.40. The ripple simulation costs 3.4 to 4.0 ms while it integrates and 0.00 once it sleeps, which it does 18 seconds after the last disturbance, so standing still is cheaper than it looks.

Elsewhere: Shadow resolution 2048 against 4096 is 0.39 against 0.50 ms in the noon scene. Smart leaf culling, on by default, took the G-buffer pass at a leaf wall from 6.66 to 7.14 ms down to 6.25. Cloud march steps (96, range 16 to 128), Fog steps (32) and Fog range (224 blocks), AO steps (8), Contact shadow steps (16) and DoF taps (12) each move a few tenths. The tune settings among these apply when the page is closed, which rebuilds the shaders in about a second; Shadow resolution needs a restart, and leaf culling applies at once. The frames page is the full list.

Memory

The one machine has 48 GB of unified memory, and nothing smaller has been tried, so I cannot tell you what an 8 GB or 16 GB Mac does. What I can say is where the memory goes. The shadow atlas is 4096 on a side by default, four cascades packed into one 2x2 atlas; 2048 is a quarter of the memory and fill. The extended horizon keeps a summary of every chunk you have seen and reaches 64 chunks by default, with choices from 32 to 128. The ripple field is 512 cells of 6.25 cm, 32 meters across, centerd on the camera. The shadow atlas at 2048 is the one memory saving I can quantify; how the rest behaves on a smaller machine is unmeasured.

Intel Macs, and what Iris says about Apple Silicon

Rockstar Shaders does not support Intel Macs. The side-car needs a Metal device that reports ray tracing support and the release target is M1 or later; nothing has been run on an Intel Mac. Windows and Linux are not supported and not tested.

The other route, Iris with a shader pack, has its own answer for this chip family. The Iris driver support page, read on 2026-09-19, lists all drivers on Apple Silicon Macs as not supported, with known crashes on common shaders, and all drivers on Intel Macs as deprecated. The reason it gives is that Iris depends on OpenGL and Apple has deprecated it. That is the same fact that pushed me to build on Vulkan and Metal instead; the Iris on a Mac page has the detail, and the Mac overview lays out every route.

If you run it on a chip I have not

Turn on Show FPS and Show pass timings on the front page of the settings, and Extended FPS if you want the last second's minimum and 1% low on the same line. A screenshot of the pass timings overlay, with your chip and window size, is the report I can act on; it lists every pass in GPU milliseconds with the passes over 2 ms in amber. Send it with logs/latest.log, as the bug report page describes. The ray tracing page explains what the Metal side-car does, if you want to know what those amber rows are before you send them.

Download free (1.0.0) Modrinth (pending)Minecraft 26.3, Fabric, macOS on Apple silicon. Install guide. Releases and bug reports on GitHub.

About the author. Ryleigh Newman wrote Rockstar Shaders and every page on this site. Facts about other packs and programs come from their own sites, with the date they were read. More about the project.

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Questions

Does Rockstar Shaders run on an M1 Mac?

The release target is Apple Silicon, M1 or later, and Apple's Metal tables say the M1 has the ray tracing API the side-car needs. It has only ever been run on an M4 Max with 48 GB, and the release notes say an M1 will be slower. I have no frame time for it.

Which Apple chip is best for Minecraft shaders?

I can only report the one I measured, an M4 Max, at 46 ms a frame at 1706x1966 and 34 to 36 ms at 1708x960. Apple says the M3 was the first Mac chip with hardware-accelerated ray tracing, but I have not measured what that hardware is worth in a Minecraft frame.

Do I need hardware ray tracing for Rockstar Shaders?

No. The Metal ray tracing API is available from Apple's Apple6 GPU family, and the M1 is Apple7, so the side-car can run on any Apple Silicon Mac. The M3 and later have dedicated hardware for it. An Intel Mac is not supported.

How much memory does it need?

The only machine it has run on has 48 GB of unified memory, and nothing smaller has been tried, so I cannot say. The shadow atlas at 2048 instead of 4096 is a quarter of the memory and fill, and it is the one saving I can quantify.

What should I lower first on a slower Mac?

Render scale. At 1706x1966 on the M4 Max, 75% saves 11 ms a frame; every quality knob is worth tenths. Leave the ray tracing on: every fallback costs more than the trace it replaces. Target FPS can lower the scale for you when frames miss the rate you pick.