Game publisher CD Projekt Red has announced that its highly popular AAA game title Cyberpunk 2077 would be coming to the Mac this week on Thursday, July 17th. While it’s a little later than the game’s original launch estimate of early 2025, we have a feeling the wait is going to be worth it.
Cyberpunk 2077, an open world first-person shooter with built-in RPG elements, is known for pushing even the highest-end gaming hardware to its extremes. Fortunately, CD Projekt Red has optimized the game for Mac hardware utilizing Apple Silicon, so it should not only run smoothly, but look just as gorgeous.
The Verge reports that Cyberpunk 2077 has been optimized for Macs donning the M1, M2, M3, and M4 chip families, but not all M1 and M2 Macs will be supported, as the game requires at least 16GB of unified memory to run. This unfortunately rules out some entry level M1 and M2 machines.
Cyberpunk 2077 is particularly graphics intensive and pushes even the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5090 graphics card in my custom-built gaming Windows PC to its limits with maxed out settings. The card runs warm, and while the aesthetics are beautiful and smooth as butter, the frame-rates aren’t as high as other popular games I play.
Fortunately, CD Projekt Red has the answer to this: specialized presets made for each variation of Apple Silicon that takes fully advantage of Apple’s Metal API so that it runs as performantly as possible, even on mobile devices like notebooks. What’s more is the game won’t skimp on graphics quality on the Mac either; it’s supposed to support path tracing, AI upscaling, and frame generation.
The Verge also reports that Apple-specific features will come baked into Cyberpunk 2077 for Mac, including HDR monitor support, Spatial Audio, and head-tracking with Apple’s high-end AirPods and AirPods Pro earbuds.
While it experienced a rocky start at the time of its launch in 2020, modern patches to Cyberpunk 2077 have flipped virtually all reviews to overwhelmingly positive across all platforms. Even on handheld systems like the Nintendo Switch 2, the game runs particularly well.
CD Projekt Red plans to launch Cyberpunk 2077 Ultimate Edition in the Mac App Store, but for users of alternative marketplaces such as Steam, the non-Ultimate Edition will be available for macOS there.
If you already play this game on Windows, or on another platform, you’ll be happy to know that the Mac version of the game will fully support cross-progression, allowing users to save game data to the cloud and pick up where they left off on any of their other platforms.