Cyberpunk 2077 and No Man’s Sky duke it out for the greatest redemption arc in gaming, but the story for Cyberpunk 2077 isn’t over yet.
The game is coming to Macs later this week, on July 17, almost five years after its initial release in December 2020.
That’s not all either. CD Projekt Red is also going to lift the lid on a brand new Cyberpunk 2077 2.3 update, with a live stream at 4pm today. That stream will tell us what’s coming, but early reports suggest it will include a reworked photo mode and new cars.
The bigger move, though, is the Mac version.
And the bad news is not every recent-ish MacBook can give it a go. Cyberpunk 2077 for Mac requires 16GB of RAM. It’s the minimum spec for Macs these days, but in the last generation, base MacBook Air laptops had 8GB, and the jump to 16GB was not cheap at £200.
However, it will work on MacBooks with an old Apple M1 chip from 2020, as long as you have that requisite 16GB RAM. But, no, it won't work on the pink iMac of the image above this article. Sorry.
CD Projekt Red announced this port in October 2024, not too long after Apple’s M4 gadgets started appearing on shelves. It's the Ultimate edition, which includes the brilliant Phantom Liberty DLC.
The game will also act as a bit of a showcase for the ray tracing chops of Apple’s latest hardware. Ever since the Apple M3 CPU laptops arrived in 2023, these PCs have had hardware support for ray tracing, which can deliver awesome-looking reflections, shadows and other lighting effects, but there’s not been a whole heap of software to actually employ it with.
Cyberpunk 2077 will offer ray tracing and path tracing, and it’ll be interesting to see how it pans out on a Mac mini or MacBook. That level of techy doodad-ery is a little out of our wheelhouse, but you can be sure the folks at Digital Foundry will let us know before too long.
Apple has traditionally been a bit reluctant to dig too much into gaming. And even the epic, landscape-shifting success of App Store gaming seemed to take it by surprise a bit.
Macs do have heaps of potential these days, though. Not only are Apple’s M-series processors powerful, the Pro and Max variants have graphics power comparable with a PC with a good dedicated graphics card.
There’s also a tool called Game Porting Toolkit, which developers can use to bring their games over to Macs. We’re still waiting for most to do so, mind.
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