Cyberpunk 2077 is a massive game – and now it’s finally out on Mac. Nearly five years on from its original release, CD Projekt Red has delivered a version of the RPG epic for Apple Silicon Mac computers, promising ray tracing support and advanced MetalFX features. So how does the sci-fi adventure hold up on Apple’s current-gen computer lineup and what should gamers expect in performance and stability? We put the port through its paces on a range of modern Mac hardware, helpfully supplied by Apple, and the results are intriguing.
Out of the box, the Mac version of Cyberpunk 2077 is fairly straightforward. The game boots without issue on my M4 Max Macbook Pro, and it presents a settings menu that is essentially identical to the PC version of the game. There are very few items of note here, except for the presence of Apple’s MetalFX temporal upscaler, which is available here alongside the analytically-based FSRs 2.1 and 3.0. The game supports any M-series Mac chip with at least 16GB of RAM, so no 8GB machines or Intel-based Macs. I’m testing three machines today, including a lower-end M4 Mac Mini, and an M4 Max MacBook Pro and M3 Ultra Mac Studio in essentially maxed-out configurations.
When you load your first save, the game seems to undergo a rapid burn of shader compilation, as observed using the detailed MacOS 26 Metal performance HUD. The number of compiled shaders explodes during the first load here on a fresh MacOS 26 install, with very little apparent shader compilation activity during gameplay. Loading another save in a different segment of the world fires up another round of shader burn, and shader compilation while in-game is fairly limited. As a result, the game doesn’t appear to suffer from shader compilation stutter, so this solution seems pretty effective. I ran Cyberpunk under MacOS 15.5 for the testing in this video, but I did dip into the MacOS 26 Beta 3 to surface some of these metrics.
By default, the game kicks you into the “For This Mac” graphics preset, which changes graphical settings based on the chip you’re using. For the M4 Max laptop, we’re essentially getting ultra settings at 1440p with MetalFX as the upscaler of choice. Dynamic resolution scaling is enabled to balance GPU load against a 60fps frame-rate target. This default setting seems to work pretty well on the MacBook, generally logging a 60fps update without issue. There are some slightly concerning drops during open-world traversal, where the game suffers from pronounced stutters for a few moments. Heavy combat moments can drag down the frame-rate graph as well with brief but harsh tumbles down into the 50s. Lengthy stutters pop up in these sequences too, which momentarily pause the action. I’m not sure exactly what’s going on here.