Pure Metal [Mac]

Pure Metal ⚡

Pure Metal adds a native Metal renderer to Minecraft on Apple Silicon Macs. It replaces the graphics backend only. The game looks the same, it just runs on Metal instead of OpenGL.

Performance 📊

Tested on a MacBook Air M2 (fanless): fullscreen 3420x2148, render distance 16, vsync off, flying the same route every run. Results are medians of several runs in alternating order.

With Sodium

Without Sodium

Render Scale vs Vulkan (without Sodium)

• About 1.8x the FPS of OpenGL with Sodium, and 2.3x without, with less than half the stutter.
• At Native resolution, Pure Metal matches Vulkan on average FPS, and its worst frames take about half as long.
  • With Render Scale at 50%, FPS goes up by about 54%, and menus and the HUD stay sharp. Native and 50% were measured alternately within the same runs.

Results vary with hardware, settings and mods.

Render Scale 🎚️

Optional, and off by default. It draws the 3D world at fewer pixels and scales it up to fill the screen. Menus, chat and the HUD always stay at full sharpness.

• Render Scale: Native, 75% Quality, 67% Balanced, 50% Performance, or any value from 50 to 100%.
• Upscaler: Bilinear (fast, recommended) or Apple's MetalFX (slightly crisper, but slower on M1/M2).
• Sharpening: Off, Low or High, to bring back detail after upscaling.

You'll find it in Video Settings, or on the Pure Metal page in Sodium's settings. Hover any option to see what it does.

How it's built 🔧

• Sodium works without any patches or add-ons. Its terrain renderer runs natively on Metal.
• Turning vsync off removes the FPS cap without causing screen tearing. If a frame misses the display refresh, it's skipped instead of torn.
• The screen always shows the newest finished frame. Older frames don't pile up, which keeps input responsive.
• Presenting frames runs separately from the game, so a slow display never holds up rendering.
• Built around how Apple GPUs work: drawing passes on the same image are merged, uploads are moved ahead of the frame, and depth data that will never be read again isn't written back to memory. That cuts the memory traffic that slows Apple GPUs down.

Privacy and safety 🔒

• No network access and no telemetry.
• If Metal can't start, Minecraft falls back to its default renderer. You can also switch to OpenGL or Vulkan in Video Settings at any time.

Requirements

• Apple Silicon Mac (M1 or newer), macOS 14 or newer
• Minecraft 26.3, Fabric Loader, Java 25
• Sodium is optional but recommended

Shader packs aren't supported.