Mac owners will soon be able to play one of the biggest games of the last five years or so. Cyberpunk 2077: Ultimate Edition will be available in the Mac App Store as well as Steam, GOG.com and the Epic Games Store on Thursday, July 17. As the name implies, it includes both the base game as well as the Phantom Liberty expansion from 2023. The port was announced last fall and was originally planned to arrive "early" this year, but it took a little longer to get everything squared away.
Unsurprisingly, you'll need an M-series Mac to play this game, but Apple and CD Projekt Red confirm that it'll work on computers all the way back to the M1 — but you'll need 16GB of RAM. For years, 8GB was the standard on entry-level Macs, so those computers will be out of luck. And of course, graphics fidelity will vary widely across the various supported chipsets, but CD Projekt Red is including a "for this Mac" graphics preset that is optimized for each Apple Silicon-based Mac. So at the very least, you shouldn't have to fuss around with settings too much to get a decent experience.
Shortly after the initial announcement, CD Projekt Red provided more details on the "for this Mac" setting as well as recommended specs. While the game does work with an M1 Mac, you're capped at 30fps and a low resolution — things escalate rapidly from there. The recommended configuration calls for an M3 Pro chip with 18GB of RAM to hit 60fps at 1080p. That configuration supports Ray Tracing, but regardless of what you're using you'll need to turn it on manually.
Things go up from there, with 36GB of RAM and either an M2 Ultra or M3 Max chip to run high fidelity; very high fidelity requires an M3 Ultra or M4 Max. That essentially means you have a $2,000 or up Mac Studio or a $3,200 and up MacBook Pro with the M4 Max if you want to run this game at the highest of settings. Of course, if you care about such things, you probably already have a good gaming PC.
As for other technical goodies, the game utilizes AMD FSR for upscaling and frame generation, and Apple's MetalFX also provides upscaling as well. Upcoming Metal 4 features announced at WWDC 2025, including Metal FX Frame Interpolation and Metal FX Denoising, are coming to the game via a future update. Metal FX Frame Interpolation generates an intermediate frame for every two input frames and can be combined with existing Metal upscaling to allow the game to hit 120fps on Ultra settings — but again, we're not sure what specific models will support that.
If you use AirPods with your Mac, Cyberpunk 2077 features spatial audio with head-tracking features. And the game supports cross-progression regardless of what platform you play on, which should be useful for anyone who started a game elsewhere and wants to pick it back up on a Mac. If you've already purchased Cyberpunk 2077 from another storefront like Steam, it'll automatically be available for Mac.
While Cyberpunk 2077 isn't exactly a new game, it remains one of the more popular and lauded titles of the decade (at least after CD Projekt Red fixed numerous launch bugs). And it joins a still small but growing number of major games optimized for Apple Silicon and the Mac, including the recently-released Assassin's Creed Shadows. A quick look on the Mac App Store also shows AAA releases including Death Stranding, Control, Lies of P, numerous Resident Evil titles as well as smaller but no less awesome games like Neva and Stray. Most big-name games don't come to the Mac at the same time as other platforms still, but the Mac is an option for more than just Apple Arcade games.
Update, July 16, 2025, 11:44AM ET: This story has been updated with more details from the developer on the different specs required to hit the varying performance tiers in Cyberpunk 2077.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/gaming/cyberpunk-2077-ultimate-edition-comes-to-the-mac-on-july-17-130047453.html?src=rss
