Minecraft doesn't run very well on my iPad Mini 5. I get frame drops below 20fps even on the lowest render distance (8 chunks).

What's worse is that my older iPad 5 (2017) ran the game at a much higher fps at 14 chunks.

I think it's mainly due to loading new chunks but a high end iPad should not be experiencing this issue.

The iPad Mini 5 has the Apple A12 Bionic chip and has 2 high-performance cores and 4 high-efficiency cores. I'm thinking that the game may be running on the high-efficiency cores rather then the high-performance cores. That might be what's causing fps drops.