The Mac just got one of the best games of the last decade. Cyberpunk: 2077 may have had a lot of technical issues when it was first released 4.5 years ago, but the ambitious open city, memorable story, and high production values helped gamers hang in there. Their patience was rewarded with a slew of patches to fix problems, re-balance game systems, add quality-of-life features, and more.
Now, coinciding with patch 2.3, Cyberpunk: 2077 is finally available for the Mac—on the App Store, Steam, and Epic Games Store. So how well does it run? Is the game worth your time and money?
Performance is just OK
First, if you’re running the macOS 26 beta, you might as well not bother with Cyberpunk: 2077 right now. The menus load fine, but the game runs in a garbled broken state. The game will get an update to support new Metal 4 features (MetalFX Frame Interpolation and Denoising) to go along with macOS 26 later this year.
On macOS Sequoia 15.5 I tested the game on a Mac Studio with an M1 Max and 32GB of RAM, and a high-end Mac mini with the 14/20 core M4 Pro, 48GB of RAM, and a 1TB SSD. That’s a $2,200 configuration. I also have an aging Windows gaming PC with a Ryzen 9 5950X, GeForce RTX 4070 Ti Super, and 32GB of RAM; a system with similar specs today would also cost around $2,200 with a newer and faster CPU.
Cyberpunk on the Mac includes a helpful “For This Mac” graphics preset that has optimized settings for every Apple Silicon configuration. On the Mac Studio with M1 Max, that meant mostly Medium graphics settings, with 1080p resolution and MetalFX dynamic resolution scaling set to a target of 60 frames per second. Turning off vsync, the built-in benchmark produced an average of 73 frames per second, but the game looked pretty bad. Bumping up the resolution to 1440p helped a lot and bumped the average to about 58fps, but I still wouldn’t want to play it this way.
CD Projekt Red
It’s pretty hard to wind up with settings that look good on a desktop monitor and run at around 60 frames per second on this older Mac. So what about the M4 Pro Mac mini?
The “For This Mac” settings on the M4 Pro bumps everything up to high quality settings with medium crowd density, no ray tracing, and a 1080p 60fps target. It looks a lot cleaner, and runs at 69fps. I could even increase the resolution up to 1440p, which sharpens the image up quite a bit, and get 63fps. That still leaves a lot of visual quality on the table, but it looks and runs well enough to provide a good overall experience.
Turning on ray tracing, even the RT Medium preset (which is high detail settings and just a few added ray tracing options) slows things to a crawl. At 1440p the benchmark ran at 29fps. At 4K resolution and Ultra settings (no ray tracing), I got 18fps. It’s a choppy unplayable mess.
If you’re wondering how a similarly priced PC runs the game, my GeForce 4070Ti Super-equipped system ran over 88fps at 1440p with the RT Medium preset. I can run the Ultra preset at 4K, with no ray tracing, at 82fps, while the souped-up M4 Pro Mac mini chugged along at 18fps. Apple is at least three times slower than a similarly priced Windows box, and sometimes worse.
It’s still a great game
It’s a tale we end up telling every time a big game comes to the Mac: Windows PCs have had this game for years and run it several times faster than a Mac of the same price.
If your iPhone got the latest hot game six months after all the Android phones, while running it 30 percent slower, you’d call Apple a failure. When it comes to gaming on the Mac, a six-month delay and 30 percent performance penalty would be a massive improvement over where things are today.
CD Projekt Red
Still, if you haven’t played Cyberpunk: 2077 yet and you have a modern, high-power Mac (an M3 Max or M4 Pro at least), it is well worth your time. It’s an incredible world and unforgettable story, with deep, varied, polished gameplay that affords you lots of freedom. With stellar art design and years of graphics updates and tweaks, it looks fantastic. It just takes a powerful and expensive Mac to run it smoothly enough, with high enough settings, for all of that to shine through.
We’ll have a closer look at Cyberpunk: 2077 performance on the Mac later this year after the release of macOS 26 and the patch that adds support for Metal 4 features, hopefully with some new Mac hardware.
Read our full review of Cyberpunk: 2077 on the Mac, as well as our best Mac Games feature.
Author: Jason Cross, Senior Editor, Macworld
Jason has written about technology for more than 25 years - first in the gaming press, then focusing on enthusiast PCs and general technology. He enjoys learning how complicated technology works and explaining it in a way anyone can understand.