So I installed Cyberpunk 2077 on my 2024 M4 Pro MacBook Pro (at no extra cost, since I've owned the Steam version forever), and gave it a go. I expressed a little disappointment on social media about the expected performance, and today I'm here to say that actually, it's decent performance, but at the cost of one major element.

"For this Mac" settings on an M4 Pro

I just used the "for this Mac" settings that are set by default, which are detailed in screenshots below, but let me summarize the headline things:

  • Output resolution 1080p
  • Frame cap 48fps
  • MetalFX upscaling enabled (on what looks like effectively "performance" mode in DLSS terms)
  • Frame generation disabled
  • Ray and path tracing disabled
  • Basically all settings on "high"

Benchmark results

First, I ran the in-game benchmark (which is a quite good representation of what you'll get in the actual game, in my experience) on the completely default settings.

This is solid! 48fps isn't the best in the world, but that is what the game sets vsync to by default, so the fact it held almost perfectly there the whole time is good, and with a variable refresh rate display like mine, it felt perfectly smooth enough to play. Good news!

I was curious, so I enabled frame generation and ran the benchmark again. This is AMD's frame gen, so it's not as good as NVIDIA's, but it was worth a shot.

Now that's what I'm talking about! An average of 119fps is very good.

Finally, how about ray tracing (with frame generation enabled)? I've got the highest end M4 Pro variant, so it's not the top of the line, and I didn't bother trying path tracing.

68fps average is still quite good, although for reasons I'll get into in a second, I would not play this way.

12 minutes of gameplay

Here's a 12-minute clip of me playing the very early part of the game using the default "for my Mac" settings, frame generation on, and ray tracing off.

The resolution

The game runs nicely and I'd actually be happy to play the game on my Mac, but there is one major limitation on the default M4 Pro settings, and that's resolution. As I mentioned in the settings overview, the output resolution is 1080p with upscaling enabled. The MetalFX upscaling lets the game "actually" run at down to 50% resolution, which is 540p.

Now, I recently wrote about how I'm a big fan of tech like upscaling and frame generation when they're done well, but one thing that's important to note about these technologies is that they perform better the higher the base render is able to achieve. In the case of Doom The Dark Ages, like I was talking about in that piece, that was upscaling about 1800p up to 4k. While MetalFX actually does a pretty decent job with upscaling, Cyberpunk is rendering a 540-900p image, upscaling it to 1080p, and presenting on a 4k. This means I get a better image than native 540p, but it's certainly not what anyone would consider "crisp".

Obviously, higher end Macs will perform better, and this is a laptop this is running on, so don't take this as a scathing review, it's just a matter of keeping expectations in check. My impression is that the Apple silicon CPU is humming along great, and likely isn't even being pushed too hard, but the GPU power is not able to render this world at a high resolution.

Setting things up to actually play the game

But all is not lost, the beauty of PC gaming is you can tweak things to your liking! 1080p just won't fly for me, so I boosted the resolution just just under 4K, dropped the visual settings to medium across the board, and was able to get a bit over 70fps in the benchmark.

An unfair(?) comparison

For fun, I boosted the game up on my PC as well to see what I got there. For fun, I started with a similar 1080p (with upscaling) benchmark, matching the Mac runs above. This included path tracing and all settings to ultra rather than high, and I was getting 153fps.

To better match what I'd actually play at, I bumped the resolution to 4K, turned path tracking off (but left ray tracing), and in this case turned off frame generation.

55fps is perfectly playable on a variable refresh rate display, but I do actually play for frame generation and it hovers around 100fps in-game.

You can see the specs in the screenshots, but this is a decidedly good, but not cutting edge PC. The NVIDIA GPU is the last generation, mid-range card and while it's pretty amazing, it's certainly not the best that money can buy. I don't bring this up to flex, but to provide context for the gaming market Apple is trying to get its foot into.

All that said, it's cool that this game is on the Mac and I hope it lets more people give it a shot. It's not going to be the full, high-end PC experience, but it seems like a perfectly decent way to play.