Cyberpunk 2077 Now Available on Mac With High Performance Presets

[uacd]

By Mac you mean M1 MacBook Air that’s sold under $1000 regularly nowadays? That processor can’t even run cyberpunk 2077 in 1080P, or run a mobile game at decent speed with high quality. Who cares about that kind of Mac.

Instead, if the base MacBook Air can have a processor that matches M1 Pro or even M3 Pro today, then developers will seriously consider entering the Mac market.

But Cyberpunk still runs (now), right?
I saw a guy (Andrew Tsai) on YT being able to play it in 25-40 FPS on lowest tier 8GB RAM m1 Air, and not with the processor that is about to have a meltdown - stats were ok. I love the philosophy of being able to play the games, not stare at some “gorgeous” GFX that only the latest NVIDIA and AMD cards can deliver.

The ages of games like Simpsons: Hit & Run, Mario 64, Cars (Pixar), Serious Sam will be forever in my memory: this was actually FUN to play. And these games would run on calculator nowadays, in emulated mode or not.

There is definitely some space for “serious” AAA, but if only small % of global population can enjoy it, is it even fun?

 

[Ricebucket]

Just google Nintendo Switch 2 overheating Reddit... Here are a couple:

1.

https://www.reddit.com/r/gadgets/comments/1lqro0g/switch_2_owners_report_overheating_and_crashes

2.

https://www.reddit.com/r/Switch/comments/1l4918o/switch_2_overheating

3. https://9to5toys.com/2025/07/02/nintendo-switch-2-consoles-are-overheating

4. https://www.tomshardware.com/video-...ng-cyberpunk-2077-and-less-power-hungry-games

This is just some people with defective units. Has nothing to do with any specific game. Nintendo will replace your unit.

 

[therunningman]

Interesting article. Apple silicon is a bottleneck for this type of thing:

Cyberpunk 2077 finally lands on Mac but you'll probably still want to play it on a PC

It's a great game and reasonably well-optimized, but modern Mac hardware struggles.

www.macworld.com

 

[Shirasaki]

But Cyberpunk still runs (now), right?
I saw a guy (Andrew Tsai) on YT being able to play it in 25-40 FPS on lowest tier 8GB RAM m1 Air, and not with the processor that is about to have a meltdown - stats were ok. I love the philosophy of being able to play the games, not stare at some “gorgeous” GFX that only the latest NVIDIA and AMD cards can deliver.

The ages of games like Simpsons: Hit & Run, Mario 64, Cars (Pixar), Serious Sam will be forever in my memory: this was actually FUN to play. And these games would run on calculator nowadays, in emulated mode or not.

There is definitely some space for “serious” AAA, but if only small % of global population can enjoy it, is it even fun?

Yes the game may “run” with degraded visuals. Yes not everyone cares about all the ray tracing or details of those characters, but still, you need decent hardware to run the game at its intended visual experience. I mean, there is no point to run the game in 640*480 with everything low.

Believe it or not, when gaming hardware were severely limited, gameplay was almost the only way game would attract people’s attention. Nowadays, while gameplay is still required, stacking ray tracing and rendering real-world like game world is also quite important, for some people. I wish some indie developers could port their simpler games to Mac but those people are exactly the kind that don’t have lots of resources to port games to a new platform, however popular Mac might become.

 

[Shirasaki]

Interesting article. Apple silicon is a bottleneck for this type of thing:

Cyberpunk 2077 finally lands on Mac but you'll probably still want to play it on a PC

It's a great game and reasonably well-optimized, but modern Mac hardware struggles.

www.macworld.com

Yeah Apple Silicon while may still beat Intel offerings left right and center, still lags behind AMD and NVIDIA in graphics department. Even a mobile game on my M1 iPad Pro I need to drop down quite a few settings to medium or low to make game playable.

With that being said, if Apple’s solution can deliver extremely comparable result, devs might be more interested. But as of today, Apple still is not interested in treating Mac as a jack of all trades machine but rather “Mac is for work”.

 

[therunningman]

They need to open the platform back up to 3rd party GPUs.

 

[k1121j]

Does this support a controller? if so I'm buying it now

 

[East India Company]

It’s beyond me why anyone would buy it on the Mac App Store. With any other store you can get it on sale and can download it also in windows (if later you do acquire a windows gaming machine or want to play on GeForce now)

 

[East India Company]

I’d almost be tempted to get back into gaming… but nah, not really.

Very true, while this game is a masterpiece, playing can degrade your life so much that it is not worth it. But rest assured that if you dive again, choose this drug.

 

[Kar98]

I just couldn’t be bothered to constantly be spending so much time doing system updates that are tons of GBs, for example, insert a disk on the PS4 to then be met with an hour+ install THEN hours long downloads/installs.

What on earth are you talking about?

 

[jakey rolling]

Imagine waiting five years (five years) to play this game just so you could be an Apple purist. Boggles the mind.

As opposed to most people who waited five years (and more) to play this game because the developer hasn't figured out how to make it run decently on anything less than the highest-end systems.

 

[Kar98]

As opposed to most people who waited five years (and more) to play this game because the developer hasn't figured out how to make it run decently on anything less than the highest-end systems.

Yeah, too bad modern game doesn't run on a potato

 

[Homy]

Interesting article. Apple silicon is a bottleneck for this type of thing:

Cyberpunk 2077 finally lands on Mac but you'll probably still want to play it on a PC

It's a great game and reasonably well-optimized, but modern Mac hardware struggles.

www.macworld.com

Yes, interesting that he calls a mobile M4 pro 20c that performs like the old M1 Max 32c "high-end" and a desktop 4070 Ti Super from last year "aging". For the same price he could have gotten himself a Mac Studio M4 Max 32c which would have been 50-70% faster in games. Still not a desktop 4070 Ti Super but much better than comparing with a M1 Max-like GPU.

 

[UltimaKilo]

Why not?

Not enough performance. Believe it or not, Apple silicon GPU performance is not great, except top of the line max/ultra chip with tons of cores and they are all expensive, very expensive.

This.

However, like I mentioned above, the M5 seems to be Apple's answer to their weak GPU performance in the M4. The M5 is slated to be Apple's biggest performance jump since the M1. Unfortunately, it looks like they are pushing back the debut.

Personally, I have an M4 Mac Mini which I plan to keep for a couple of years.

 

[teh_hunterer]

This.

However, like I mentioned above, the M5 seems to be Apple's answer to their weak GPU performance in the M4. The M5 is slated to be Apple's biggest performance jump since the M1. Unfortunately, it looks like they are pushing back the debut.

Personally, I have an M4 Mac Mini which I plan to keep for a couple of years.

Is there a particular technology in those two games that Apple Silicon GPUs can't handle?

 

[teh_hunterer]

Interesting article. Apple silicon is a bottleneck for this type of thing:

Cyberpunk 2077 finally lands on Mac but you'll probably still want to play it on a PC

It's a great game and reasonably well-optimized, but modern Mac hardware struggles.

www.macworld.com

Articles like this miss the point somewhat. I'm enjoying the game a lot on my M3 Pro. It runs for hours without the fans even spinning up (16" MacBook Pro), and without the computer spitting out a bunch of heat into my room. For me, playing a game like this silently without the room getting uncomfortably hot, that's a paradigm shift.

People want to compare fps to fps directly, but that's not the whole story. And we haven't even gotten the Metal 4 features yet anyway for a proper comparison.

People also talk about the cost per frame, as if you're starting with no computer and you're building a gaming PC or getting a Mac. In that made up scenario, of course the gaming PC is going to give you more value. But I already have my Mac, and I'm always going to have a Mac because of the work I do. If the Mac can game well enough that I don't have to spend more money on a second computer just for gaming, that's a significant cost savings.

I will say though that Apple could balance their chips better. They dedicate too much silicon to the CPU and not enough to the GPU imo.

 

[panjandrum]

There is no such thing as "fake frames". All frames are calculated by the GPU.

It's just a shorthand and is commonly used. They are indeed real frames, generated from other frames. (They are basically a form "frame tweening" - but that is an older term has largely fallen out of use.) In general conversation frames generated with any of the frame-gen technologies are called "fake" for purposes of brevity. To date they are not as high quality as the rendered frames, but in the end the newer frame-gen technologies are looking pretty decent and don't introduce nearly as much input lag as the initial versions.

 

[Kar98]

Is there a particular technology in those two games that Apple Silicon GPUs can't handle?

In the case of CyP2077, it's not a particular technology that makes it so taxing on hardware, but how much there is of everything. Cars, people, world, so much going on... it was near enough a slide show on the XBox One X with a spinner drive. Plays smooth as butter now, many patches and some hardware upgrades later.

 

[Ethosik]

Frame Gen is just to get the highest fake FPS, I normally turn it off and with Path RT a 7800x3d and 9070XT lingers around 70-80 fps which at 3440x1440 is pretty decent for a mid range PC.

Here is it running on the base M4 on the 'For this Mac' preset. Pretty terrible. For the same settings as the 7800x3d and 9070xt it gets below 10 FPS.

View attachment 2529633

Frame gen is destorying games. The intention is good. If you are getting around 90 FPS and want to enable it for ultra high refresh rates....GREAT. But so many games are coming out that REQUIRE frame gen to just get to the 1080p 60fps.

 

[Ethosik]

There is no such thing as "fake frames". All frames are calculated by the GPU.

Yes it is, the frame itself is not generated by the game engine itself, otherwise it would be high FPS without frame gen.

If your criteria is things calculating by the GPU then that throws literally everything out the window and is not helpful with these conversations. DLSS is also using the GPU but the game engine itself is NOT producing the resolution that is being output.

 

[diamond.g]

Frame gen is destorying games. The intention is good. If you are getting around 90 FPS and want to enable it for ultra high refresh rates....GREAT. But so many games are coming out that REQUIRE frame gen to just get to the 1080p 60fps.

Frame Gen is just fancy motion smoothing. It is kinda of cool that the Steam overlay is able to show you the base frame rate and the FG frame rate at the same time. It also is a good way to see that changes are your base frame rate actually goes down from what you would expect with FG disabled.

 

[Kar98]

Frame Gen is just fancy motion smoothing. It is kinda of cool that the Steam overlay is able to show you the base frame rate and the FG frame rate at the same time. It also is a good way to see that changes are your base frame rate actually goes down from what you would expect with FG disabled.

You need LOTS of computing power to animate this butt:

 

[teh_hunterer]

In the case of CyP2077, it's not a particular technology that makes it so taxing on hardware, but how much there is of everything. Cars, people, world, so much going on... it was near enough a slide show on the XBox One X with a spinner drive. Plays smooth as butter now, many patches and some hardware upgrades later.

Cyberpunk runs pretty well, but the person I was responding to was saying a couple of other games could never run on Apple silicon even if they were ported so I'm just asking them what about those two games specifically puts them out of reach.

 

[teh_hunterer]

There is no such thing as "fake frames". All frames are calculated by the GPU.

They are fake frames. Real frames are tied to game logic. Fake frames are inserted by the GPU to make it feel smoother, but that doesn't mean the game is actually running at a higher frame rate.

It can be worth using in some cases where it genuinely feels better to have it on, but just because a GPU has inserted a frame between actual game frames, doesn't make it a "real frame".

 

[throAU]

i was surprised