CD Projekt Red’s Cyberpunk 2077: Ultimate Edition is coming to the Mac this week, a few months after the port was announced as part of Apple’s M4 MacBook Pro introduction last fall. The good news for Mac gamers is that Cyberpunk will run on just about anything with Apple Silicon in it, going all the way back to the original M1 (though owners of the last few fading Intel Macs won’t be able to play it at all).
One hard-and-fast requirement for playability is at least 16GB of unified RAM. The 8GB versions of the M1, M2, and M3 don’t have the memory they need to play the game. Any Pro, Max, or Ultra chip of any generation will clear this requirement, so it’s only really a concern for buyers of lower-end Macs.
Users who want to play the game will also need to install the macOS 15.5 update, since the game won’t run on anything older. The game will also require 92GB of storage when downloaded from Steam, GOG, or the Epic Games Store and 159GB of storage when downloaded from the Mac App Store. The difference in size is because the App Store version “has all voiceovers included” and because Apple’s App Review guidelines (see section 2.4.5, item iv) prohibit apps from downloading additional files after the initial download is done.
An Apple M1 with 16GB of RAM, the game’s minimum supported configuration, should be able to hit 30 fps at resolutions of 1440 by 900 or 1600 by 900. For those who want to tweak their settings to hit higher resolutions or frame rates, the game includes support for both AMD’s FSR upscaling and Apple’s own MetalFX upscaling, which can improve performance with a relatively minimal impact on image quality.
PC-like power, console-like benefits
Cyberpunk is a big get for the Mac’s gaming team, as it's an enduringly popular open-world game with a distinctive look, but it’s also of a piece with all of the AAA gaming launches the Mac has seen in the last couple of years. It’s a popular and graphically impressive game from a major studio, but it’s also coming to the Mac years after it initially arrived on PCs and consoles.
Cyberpunk’s graphics settings show where the Mac could have advantages as a gaming platform, though. Like PCs, Apple Silicon Macs are available at all kinds of price and performance levels, from the low-end fanless MacBook Air to the top-tier M3 Ultra Mac Studio. But unlike PCs, where developers can’t account for all of the possible CPU, GPU, motherboard, storage, and RAM configurations, Windows versions, and graphics driver updates, the Mac comes in a more finite number of configurations with more tightly controlled software. This makes it easier for developers to target and tune for specific hardware.
Case in point, Cyberpunk’s “For this Mac” preset. Unlike the PC game’s Steam Deck preset, this isn’t a fixed collection of specific settings made with one particular hardware configuration in mind. Rather, it’s a dynamic preset that chooses different settings based on which specific Mac hardware you’re running the game on. An M1 Mac using this preset would get different settings than an M4 Max Mac using the same preset, and players can choose it knowing that they ought to get reasonably smooth and consistent performance with the best settings that their individual Mac can reasonably handle. (The one setting “For this Mac” doesn’t touch is ray-tracing, which can be manually enabled on M3- and M4-series Macs with the GPU hardware to support it but which won’t be turned on automatically.)
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