Apple Silicon Mac owners can finally experience Cyberpunk 2077: Ultimate Edition from tomorrow, with the release date of the AAA title said to happen on July 17 for this platform. When the official announcement came out last year, it was revealed that path tracing would be added to the port, but prior to the game launching tomorrow, CD PROJEKT RED has revealed that ray tracing will not be enabled by default on compatible Macs, regardless of the internal specifications.
The developer mentions that this will be done to maintain optimal performance, but it is obvious that ray tracing is a graphically intensive setting in which the framerate will plummet if your hardware is not powerful enough. We also learn that to have ray tracing enabled while maintaining a 60FPS experience, an M3 Max will be required, and it will be rendering Cyberpunk 2077: Ultimate Edition at a lower resolution. We have discussed even more details below, so read on to find out.
Ray tracing preset set to ‘Medium’ will result in a 60FPS experience with the M3 Max, Macs running M3 Pro can expect half the performance
Even though the minimum requirements to run Cyberpunk 2077: Ultimate Edition on Macs are having an M1 paired with 16GB of unified RAM, hardware-accelerated ray tracing is only supported from Apple’s M3 onwards. Even then, do not expect just the M3 to deliver a solid framerate, because you need to own an M3 Pro at a bare minimum to up those visual settings. Also, CD PROJEKT RED has not clarified if Mac owners can enable ray tracing or path tracing, with the latter being more graphically demanding.
To maintain a 30FPS average framerate with the ray tracing preset set to ‘Medium,’ you need to have an M3 Pro, with the resolution set to 1,920 x 1,080 with MetalFX DRS enabled manually. As for M3 Max owners, you can get a 60FPS experience with the same settings, but it should be noted that to get such a game running on Apple Macs, you need to have some expensive hardware in your possession. Fortunately, users can enable MetalFX upscaling and MetalFX Frame Interpolation to boost performance, with both technologies present in Apple’s Metal 4 API.
As mentioned above, Cyberpunk 2077: Ultimate Edition will launch on the Mac App Store, Steam, GOG.com, and Epic Games Store tomorrow, and we will provide timely updates on how the game performs on various Apple Silicon devices.
About the author: Omar Sohail is a reporter and analyst for Wccftech's mobile section, specializing in the technology and business of the mobile industry. His expertise lies in the intricate hardware supply chain, covering developments in semiconductor manufacturing, chip lithography, and camera sensor technology.
Follow Wccftech on Google to get more of our news coverage in your feeds.
