Intensely demanding AAA game Cyberpunk 2077 is coming to the Mac
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Honestly the game played extremely well on my PC. I mean I had a 3080 which is still probably a bit above the median in terms of graphics power, and I didn't play it until a few years after launch, but it looked amazing and ran well over 80fps most of the time (I kept ray tracing off, though, since I never see any real image quality benefits).
Hope it runs well for the Mac crowd.
Hope it runs well for the Mac crowd.
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My MBA plays Rimworld ok. Haven't gotten to late game yet, but that's a damn good amount of gaming entertainment.
Too bad I don't have a mouse with me. I can play it on the trackpads on my Deck just fine, but mouse and trackpad just sucks.
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That’s a bit grandiose considering I’m already playing Satisfactory, Valheim, Skyrim and more using (free) Wine emulation through Whisky. It’s quite amazing how many games now run perfectly. You just install (Windows) Steam and install and run games normally.
There are some games that require tweaking but a huge number just run. Even demanding games—people have had Cyberpunk running for a while now, though tbf, that is one of the more difficult ones.
Main unfixable problems come from copy protection or some proprietary launchers, the same banes of PC gamers.
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When I got my first MacBook back in 2008, I quickly found out that the integrated graphics weren’t up to snuff. I could play Portal at low settings, but not much more than that.
For years I would pine for a MacBook Pro with a graphics card so that I could actually game on my beloved machine. But even those weren’t all that great from what I read. When Apple released the M1 in 2020, my dream came true, the Mac was finally capable of being a respectable gaming machine… and with no fan on the Air at that!
Ironically, I’d lost interest in PC and laptop gaming. My Switch was and is good enough for me.
For years I would pine for a MacBook Pro with a graphics card so that I could actually game on my beloved machine. But even those weren’t all that great from what I read. When Apple released the M1 in 2020, my dream came true, the Mac was finally capable of being a respectable gaming machine… and with no fan on the Air at that!
Ironically, I’d lost interest in PC and laptop gaming. My Switch was and is good enough for me.
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They are rare enough that Apple can make a high profile announcement in one of their events every time a high profile game is coming to Mac. See the previous announcements for Death Stranding or Resident Evil.
The games in question are usually several years ago, already available on every platform under the sun, and are being ported to Mac only because Apple has funded the porting effort. But don't sweat the small details!
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Yesterday's video for the Mini had a brief clip of Control -- a game I got stuck at one point years ago. Unlike this one though, I don't see any announcements; can you actually buy it officially, or is there some hoop-jumping involved?
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I'm a little surprised that this particular title was one chosen to do this work on, it's the last time CD Projekt Red is going to use this engine, they're switching to Unreal Engine 5 for all future work. It seems like a lot of effort for something that's never going to be reused.
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Unfortunately, it's not just copy protection, it's anti-cheat that is the biggest problem. Until Linux and Mac are treated as equals to PC and console, it'll continue to be an impossible hurdle.
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It’s a little late, but welcome. 2077 remains a fiercely ambitious title and is a great addition to the catalog.
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I have an M1 Max, so i'll be curious to see if I can meet the requirements. If not, still a decent amount of gaming available.
Though the less hoop jumping the better, glad another publisher is releasing a native app like what Larian did for Baldur’s Gate 3.
Though the less hoop jumping the better, glad another publisher is releasing a native app like what Larian did for Baldur’s Gate 3.
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With Microsoft making noises about pushing all 3rd party code out of kernel space after the Crowdstrike issue that might be not as much of an issue in the near future.
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CP2077 is still a technical showcase and since it got fixed up and updated and got a companion anime, it's pretty popular now. Given the technical showcase nature, I could see some additional financial support from Apple encouraging a port that wouldn't be there for eg Witcher 3.
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As I understand it, every game they’ve made has been on a custom fork of their engine anyway? Don’t know if that makes more or less sense.
The M3 generation introduced some very helpful feature improvements to the GPU cores but in terms of raw horsepower I’d expect an M1 Max to still be relevant here. Fingers crossed for you.
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Oh, cool. And thanks to being a CDPR game it will be available on GOG. Will definitely buy it. Worth supporting even if I don't have time to play.
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The Windows version on Steam performs already well on my Mac Studio M1 Max with Whisky in a resolution of 2560 x 1440. I am impressed how well … No glitches, no problems.
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Typo in the article: you have the game title listed as 2027 instead of 2077 in the text.
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Glad to see Apple making investments into gaming on their platforms. Cautiously hopeful some kind of momentum can be gained and sustained with it. Maybe I’m just biased as an Apple user and developer on their platforms by day job, but iOS and Swift are pretty excellent, and I’d love my Mac to be capable of fun as well as it’s capable at productivity.
I’m aware there’s low marketshare and proprietary APIs, so, not 100% sure how this all pans out. Though I see Godot is soon to ship a Metal renderer so that’s promising, somewhat.
(I’ve used other platforms as well, including Steam Deck and Linux PCs. Pretty much the only thing I avoid using these days are consoles or windows)
I’m aware there’s low marketshare and proprietary APIs, so, not 100% sure how this all pans out. Though I see Godot is soon to ship a Metal renderer so that’s promising, somewhat.
(I’ve used other platforms as well, including Steam Deck and Linux PCs. Pretty much the only thing I avoid using these days are consoles or windows)
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Still keeping with this thing where they show one PC AAA port from a few years ago ported to mac.
There's some baby steps in here, and game porting toolkit is a big help, but 99% of users still aren't going to take any extra steps and this doesn't break the nut of mac gaming in a big way. I wish they'd just team up with Valve or something to make it a seamless, it just works layer that makes almost every Steam Windows game just work on mac or something. Or else use even 1% of their yearly buyback and dividend amount on a fund to encourage porting to mac by offsetting some of the cost.
There's some baby steps in here, and game porting toolkit is a big help, but 99% of users still aren't going to take any extra steps and this doesn't break the nut of mac gaming in a big way. I wish they'd just team up with Valve or something to make it a seamless, it just works layer that makes almost every Steam Windows game just work on mac or something. Or else use even 1% of their yearly buyback and dividend amount on a fund to encourage porting to mac by offsetting some of the cost.
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That’s encouraging. Hopefully an M-series native version will be performant enough to enjoy at decent settings.
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Let's see if it works as well as on my four year old linux workstation. When I switched to linux, I was really surprised how well games worked in steam, and even outside of steam with tools like lutris. And half the cost of this thing was the GPU 
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Ironically, you may be able to run more games from Linux on your Macbook: https://rosenzweig.io/blog/aaa-gaming-on-m1.html
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Wow, It's already been 4 years? I never did complete a play through yet. I keep meaning to get to it one day, but I always find another game or something that I seem to like more like Talos 2 that I'm slowly finishing up.
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Maybe developers are dipping their toes with older games because it's easier to port something they know rather than deal with a new platform and the time crunch of developing a new game. Either way this is a good thing overall for Mac gaming and the fact that more and more games are coming out imo shows that Apple did indeed build it and now developers seem to be coming.
One major factor for previous Mac gaming failures was that the hardware in general just wasn't up to snuff. Now even a lowly MacBook Air can play games at maybe not the highest quality or the highest framerates but they can do it much better than that hamstrung iGPU they had from intel. If Apple keeps building on the Metal api and the GPU, I'm sure more developers will show interest.
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For those who want to game on linux, Alyssa Rosenzweig just gave a very intersting talk about the current GPU driver implementation on Asahi Linux (so, if you are OK with dual boot, that could be a possibility). Right now, only M1 and M2 are supported, and the technical details are incredibly, well, technical, but the current drivers are now able to play nearly all Linux-supported Steam games on a M1 with very good performances (40-45 frames-per-second, which is good enough for many games although it might be limited for highly competitive games).
The software stack is a bit scary (Steam for x86 runs on FEX emulator for Arm64 with 4K pages on a virtualized kernel (muvm) because FEX does not yet support 16K pages that are required to run linux on a M1/M2. The GPU driver is a passthru driver, meaning that the game, in fine, directly talk to the lower-level driver). It's even more scary if you take into account wine and the DX11 to Vulkan translation layer. Despite that, the system offers impressive performances. Fun thing is: the list of supported games includes Cyberpunk 2077
For futher information,
Side note: this is hot news (the video was released a few jours ago) yet the full stack is available right now. To install it on your Asahi Linux, just update your system and dnf install steam and you should be OK. As a bonus you'll get a Vulkan 1.3 conformant driver and an OpenCL 3 conformant driver.
The software stack is a bit scary (Steam for x86 runs on FEX emulator for Arm64 with 4K pages on a virtualized kernel (muvm) because FEX does not yet support 16K pages that are required to run linux on a M1/M2. The GPU driver is a passthru driver, meaning that the game, in fine, directly talk to the lower-level driver). It's even more scary if you take into account wine and the DX11 to Vulkan translation layer. Despite that, the system offers impressive performances. Fun thing is: the list of supported games includes Cyberpunk 2077
For futher information,
- https://lwn.net/Articles/995383/ (require subscription, will be available for free to the general public in a week)
View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TtLP5sAXYKo
(talk ; yes, it starts in French. That's a joke by Alyssa).- https://indico.freedesktop.org/event/6/contributions/284/attachments/230/310/slides.pdf (... the presentation slides?)
Side note: this is hot news (the video was released a few jours ago) yet the full stack is available right now. To install it on your Asahi Linux, just update your system and dnf install steam and you should be OK. As a bonus you'll get a Vulkan 1.3 conformant driver and an OpenCL 3 conformant driver.
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CP2077 is still a technical showcase and imo a very good benchmark title for RT. So imo it's the perfect game to port as a test of Apple's GPU and Metal api. I don't think there is any game out right now now that taxes RT to the same level.
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It works well on my M1 Max under crossover… it is almost garranteed it will work significantly better natively.
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I don’t think it’s primarily about the hardware, the main roadblock for porting the games on Mac has always been Apple themselves. Their entire attitude is that they can do whatever they please with their platforms, and expect the developers to adjust to the changes, no matter how breaking. It’s a constant support treadmill, fixing the stuff that Apple broke in your previously perfectly functioning product after every update. If it is even possible, like when Apple removed support for 32-bit binaries altogether, rendering 3/4 of Mac Steam libraries non-functional. This works for apps, but it‘s completely contrary to how game development processes on any other platform are structured. You finish a project, release it, do a patch cycle, and move on.
And that’s not even talking about porting the game to either Metal or an absolutely ancient OpenGL version that could be removed with any upcoming OS version. A significant effort just to address a tiny market.
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I finished the game and its DLC 4 times already on my M2 Max 30 cores using GPTK. And pretty smoothly thanks to FSR3 frame generation (1080p constant 60FPS High Settings). Playing on the ProMotion display is a treat, and I can't wait to play the game at native resolution Ultra settings! We won't get ray tracing unfortunately, but it's ok.
CDPR ditched Apple when they started making shitty MBP with Intel integrated GPUs only (except for high-end, overpriced ones). There was no chance Witcher 3 or Cyberpunk could have run correctly on those machines.
Cyberpunk was released in December 2020, just one month after the introduction of M1
Game Studio are coming simply back, after years of terrible graphic performance.
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Personally I’m not into competitive multiplayer games, so it would please me if studios are willing to bring their single player and coop games to Mac (and maybe Apple TV for more controller-oriented game designs), even if the likes of Call of Duty need to wait a bit longer until the middleware vendors are appropriately incentivised.
I’m still hopeful that the increasingly large fleet of MacBooks with non-terrible graphics performance will start to look like an addressable market.
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I'm done with PS5 and Sony. They way they have destroyed Destiny 2 is apalling. (I am aware a lot of it was self-inflicted by Bungie). But Sony is just doing everything they can to ruin what made this game graet with the best gunplay and character movement by far over any other game.
I might give CP2077 a try, as well as Death Stranding.
I might give CP2077 a try, as well as Death Stranding.
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This really should have been done ages ago. I know it may break some legacy software, but it's almost 2025. Especially with the way Crowdstrike was getting around signed updates/definitions. No one really needs access to kernel space, except Microsoft.
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