We keep talking about Cyberpunk 2077 five years after launch for good reason. It’s still a high watermark for in-game graphics. I’ve been playing it religiously for the fifth time on Switch 2, amazed that the game runs so well on a slim handheld. Now it’s coming to Apple’s Mac products, and the fanfare has been far more subdued. We’ll see how well it performs when it hits the scene on July 17. We’ll also find out if Apple fans honestly care about Cyberpunk 2077 on a MacBook Air compared to Nintendo diehards playing the same game running on the Switch handheld.

MacOS was supposed to get Cyberpunk 2077 earlier this year, but Apple delayed the release, likely to fine-tune the game for the M-series chips that power Macs. A day before launch, you can now see the system requirements on developer CD Projekt Red’s page. The M1 Mac is supported, though only if you have a model with 16GB of RAM (sorry to anybody who bought an entry-level Mac with only 8GB of memory). The devs promise you’ll get 30 fps at 1,440 x 900 resolution. The recommended specs ask for at least an M3 Pro-level Mac with 16GB of RAM to play the game at 60 fps at 1080p. For anything close to 1440p, you’ll need at least an M2 Ultra or M3 Max, or opt for something even more expensive. Some tailored “For this Mac” presets also get access to ray tracing settings equivalent to medium settings on PC.

The average PC gaming diehard may find those benchmarks laughable, but let’s remember what’s actually happening here. Apple’s M-series silicon is an APU, or an accelerated processing unit, which is a single chip with CPU and GPU capabilities. Benchmark after benchmark regularly proves Apple has some of the best processors for lightweight laptops, but they are also based on ARM microarchitecture, not the x86 used by both Intel and AMD for today’s CPUs. If there’s any game that will test the prowess of Apple’s chips, it’s Cyberpunk 2077. The one question is, will Mac owners or gamers even care?

We’ve been hearing about this release for months. Apple first hinted to Gizmodo that Cyberpunk 2077 was on its way last year at a larger gaming showcase in 2024. The Mac maker first showed Gizmodo gameplay of the sci-fi shooter running on the $4,000 M3 Ultra chip for the 2025 Mac Studio. This was on high settings with ray tracing enabled, though of course we didn’t even know its frame rate. I’m more curious about how it runs on a base M4 chip found in the fanless M4 MacBook Air, but I’m a tech nerd who writes about this stuff for a living. Most Mac owners just want to know the game is playable and looks good enough.

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Cyberpunk 2077 on Switch 2 is a fine-tuned port that uses visual and digital trickery to maximize performance. As Digital Foundry noted in its overview of the game on Nintendo’s handheld, CD Projekt Red removed small environmental details that would stress the system’s CPU. It also relied on Nvidia’s DLSS, an AI upscaler that takes each generated frame at a lower resolution and artificially changes it to a higher resolution while maintaining performance at the lower fidelity. The game runs well and plays great with a more stable frame rate than the more expensive Steam Deck, as evidenced by Digital Foundry’s tests and our own anecdotal findings.

CD Projekt Red had the head start for Switch since it was developing it for Nintendo’s Nvidia-made chip. The same can’t be said for Apple’s M-series, which is based on ARM microarchitecture. Apple has spent the last few years promoting Macs for gaming, though mostly through ports of games like Death Stranding, Control, Resident Evil 4, Frostpunk 2, Assassin’s Creed Shadows, and a few other viral games like Valheim and Palworld. Cyberpunk 2077 will be a real test for the limits of M-series silicon. The game may reveal the ceiling for what modern Macs are capable of, rather than express the power of these computers. Most Mac owners are just happy to have more titles available, but the slow trickle of releases needs to become a torrent of new releases for Mac gaming to stick.