Cyberpunk 2077 For Mac Will Put Apple Silicon To The Test Versus PC Master Race

hero nightcity cyberpunk 2077

Now that updates for CD Projekt’s massive open-world first-person RPG are finally more-or-less done, you might have reasonably thought you wouldn’t see fresh news about it. Well think again, folks, because Cyberpunk 2077 is about to get a native release for Apple’s Mac computers, and we’re real curious to see how it performs.

It’s not that Apple’s machines don’t have the processor power to offer compelling gaming performance. Even though the company has moved to its own in-house lineup of parts that consists entirely of fully-integrated system-on-a-chip designs, the Mx series of Apple Silicon is quite potent, pairing speedy custom Arm cores with dense GPUs and double-, triple-, or quadruple-wide memory buses compared to typical AMD and Intel chips.
foliage cyberpunk 2077
NVIDIA’s DLSS Ray Reconstruction allows fine shadow detail even under very tiny leaves.

As such, we have no doubt that the Mx chips can produce plenty of gaming grunt for Cyberpunk 2077. The real eyebrow-lifting part of this announcement is where CD Projekt Red says that players can enjoy “advanced features like path tracing, frame generation, and built-in Spatial audio” in the Mac port.

Frame generation is easy enough; even if Apple didn’t expose such a feature in its Metal 3 API toolkit, CD Projekt could certainly implement the open-source FidelityFX Super Resolution 3 version. Path tracing is a bit of a different matter. The term is used to mean different things by different people, but the version in Cyberpunk 2077 is also called “full ray-tracing” by NVIDIA, and it basically means using ray-tracing to perform all lighting and shadowing calculations within a scene.
elevator cyberpunk2077
Check out the light making a grille pattern on the mist, and how it fills the room when the elevator opens.

This, as you can imagine, requires considerable ray-tracing horsepower. On Windows, enabling path tracing in Cyberpunk 2077 can easily bring even a mighty GeForce RTX 4090 to its knees—even at a1080p resolution. It is ludicrously demanding, so the fact that this feature will be coming to Macs is quite intriguing. Comparing raw specifications, even the M3 Max has roughly the GPU horsepower of a GeForce RTX 4060—but of course, raw numbers don’t tell the full story.
daylight cyberpunk 2077
Realistic daytime lighting can make some scenes look nearly photographic.

One ace that Apple has up its sleeve is its unified memory configuration. There are some pretty intense optimizations that can be done when a CPU and GPU share the same memory space, particularly with regards to ray-tracing. It’s possible that Apple’s larger M3 and M4 chips may actually be ray-tracing beasts. We’ll find out when the native Mac version of Cyberpunk 2077 hits the Mac App Store, GOG, Steam, and Epic early next year.

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