I Played ‘Cyberpunk 2077’ on Mac and It Feels Perilously Close to PC Gaming

Cyberpunk 2077 strode like a solo cyberninja onto MacBooks with the kind of swaggering bravado you’d expect from a chromed-up Night City merc. Knowing you can run CD Projekt Red’s graphically intense game, even if not at the peak ultra settings, is a mark of how well the device plays AAA titles. In case you missed it, Cyberpunk is now on Mac, and I’ve tested it on a plethora of Apple’s M-series laptops from the last few years. The good news is it’s playable, but for many Apple fans, this will be their first true taste of finagling graphics options and drowning in frame rate data like your average PC gamer. Welcome to the party, chooms.

I was impressed by how the game ran on Nintendo Switch 2, and that was because the developers put in extra effort to enable AI upscaling to remove small environmental details that would hinder the CPU. That game ran at 1080p in handheld mode and when docked. But the Mac ecosystem is far more varied, and CD Projekt Red wasn’t going to create a different version of the game for each individual size and chip. Whereas gamers could expect relative consistency on a console, the Mac version is essentially the PC version of the game. Apple insisted the game default to the “For this Mac” graphic preset. On all systems I tested, the default settings pushed the resolution way down for the sake of consistent gameplay. It’s the worst way to play the game.

On an M4 MacBook Air 13, with its 2,560 x 1,600 resolution display, Cyberpunk automatically pushed the resolution down to 1,170 x 1,068. The game runs at medium settings with no ray tracing and manages to squeak out a little over 40 fps in benchmarks. The lower resolution worked in combination with MetalFX upscaling, which takes frames at a lower resolution and transforms them so they look better. This keeps frame rates at a playable level. Without MetalFX, you’ll struggle to meet 30 fps at these same settings. If you boost the resolution to native, you’ll likely struggle to meet the playable 30 fps in most scenes.

Apple’s base settings also enable VSync, which sets the max fps at 30. It’s the first thing you should toggle off if you plan to play the game on Mac. With VSync on and set to 30 fps, the game feels floaty and visuals blurry, as if the player character is a drunk stumbling home after a long night. It’s worth seeing frame rate dips into the high 20s for the sake of smoother gameplay. With that said, the game doesn’t look half bad on a $1,200 MacBook Air with the 10-core GPU, even if the resolution and upscaling muddles textures and create odd visual pop-in where in-game objects or details appear when you get close.

Older MacBooks with non-Pro-level M-series chips will likely dip the graphics settings and resolution even lower, if you can actually play it at all. Previous models of MacBook Air came with only 8GB of memory at their minimum spec, and those models cannot run Cyberpunk at all. The M1 MacBooks can technically run the game, but at the low, low resolution of 900p. Things aren’t much better on a $1,600 MacBook Pro 14 with M4, either. It sits at 1,800 x 1,125 resolution, and if you try to go to native 3,024 x 1,964, you’ll find the frame rate just isn’t consistent enough with medium settings. On an M3 MacBook Pro 14, Apple sets the resolution to the same as the one with M4, but it wants you to play on most settings set to low. In my tests, I found you should still be able to handle medium graphics with that Mac.

Apple will set low resolution no matter if it’s a lower-end or higher-end chip. After multiple tests, I found the real minimum you want for the game is one of the more recent Macs with a Pro-level chip, like the $2,500 MacBook Pro 16 with M4 Pro. Apple and CD Projekt Red set the “For this Mac” settings base resolution at 1,728 x 1,080 and no ray tracing for 60 fps gameplay, but benchmarks put the actual uncapped frame rate at over 70 fps. Turn on ray tracing to ultra and set to 1200p, and you will get just under 60 fps during gameplay. Even at 4K, you can still achieve playable frame rates, though you’ll need to accept below 40 fps gameplay and minimal ray tracing. I haven’t tested the Mac mini with M4 Pro and Cyberpunk 2077; it might have more constrained performance. That device starts at $1,400 for a version of the M4 Pro with a 16-core GPU compared to the 20-core GPU on the MacBook Pro.

So now that Mac has a few more games you may want to play, can a MacBook be your next mobile gaming rig? It depends on how much you’re willing to spend. When I reviewed it in 2023, my M3 Max MacBook Pro 16, sent to me by Apple, was $4,000 at launch, and it still will set the base resolution for Cyberpunk at 1440p for 60 fps with ray tracing enabled. For the highest-end, you’ll need an M4 Max or M3 Ultra chip currently only found on Mac Studio. Those devices start at $2,000 for a 14-core M4 Max. The 60-core GPU on the M3 Ultra Mac Studio demands $4,000 at base. As good as previous M-series Macs were, only the latest and more expensive models will be able to offer an experience close to what you can get on today’s current consoles or gaming PCs.

Apple’s main concern should be how it will present these graphics options if it keeps pushing Macs and gaming. The “For this Mac” graphics options pretend to offer console-like ease for getting into the game, but they make the game feel far worse than if you tuned the settings yourself. It shouldn’t be the norm going forward, even if Apple wants to make it easy for the average Mac owner. Apple fans will just have to suffer within their graphics settings, like the rest of us PC gamers.

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