Last year, Apple and CD PROJEKT RED announced that Cyberpunk 2077: Ultimate Edition would arrive for Apple Silicon Macs. For those who have been patient with the game’s release, we are pleased to inform that it will arrive next week and will support a host of technologies designed to improve image quality and boost framerate. The best part about the AAA title’s launch for the Mac is that it will support machines featuring the older M1, but if you do not have the 16GB unified RAM configuration, you can forget about running it.
CD PROJEKT RED will include a visual preset called ‘for this Mac’ for Apple Silicon models, with this setting optimizing image quality and performance
The game will officially arrive on the Mac App Store, Steam, GOG.com, and Epic Games Store on July 17 and will include both the base game and the Phantom Liberty expansion that launched in 2023. We have an in-depth review that you can check out before if you have yet to play it. Regarding system requirements, it appears that both Apple and CD PROJEKT RED have worked incredibly hard because Cyberpunk 2077: Ultimate Edition will support older hardware such as the M1, but as mentioned above, users will need to make sure that their configuration sports 16GB of unified RAM.
For machines equipped with 8GB of RAM, you might be out of luck. Given that Cyberpunk 2077: Ultimate Edition is a VRAM-intensive title, having sufficient memory could be mandatory. Even though Apple Silicon Mac owners will have a ton of graphics settings to tweak, the game developer will include a ‘for this Mac’ preset that optimizes image quality and performance based on different chipsets. Of course, technologies such as MetalFX upscaling will be baked into the game, along with MetalFX Frame Interpolation and MetalFX Denoising, both of which were added to Apple’s Metal 4 API this year.
This technology will work similarly to NVIDIA’s Frame Generation, where an immediate frame is generated for two input frames to smooth the gameplay by raising the performance, though the trade-off is that it will increase input lag. Users should also note that to properly experience this technology, the base framerate needs to be higher. Cyberpunk 2077: Ultimate Edition will also support spatial audio with head-tracking features if you use AirPods when playing the game.
As for the expected performance, it was demonstrated that the M4 Max could easily hit 120FPS when running the title, but our thorough investigation revealed that this framerate could not have been achieved without interpolation and upscaling. After all, our RTX 4090 laptop obtains between 75-80FPS with Frame Generation enabled and Quality DLSS, with the base resolution set to 2,560 x 1,600 and all the image settings set to their maximum values, including path tracing. Once the game arrives, we will conduct an in-depth performance analysis for all Apple Silicon Macs, so stay tuned for more updates.
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