PC-like power, console-like benefits
Cyberpunk is a big get for the Mac’s gaming team, as it’s an enduringly popular open-world game with a distinctive look, but it’s also of a piece with all of the AAA gaming launches the Mac has seen in the last couple of years. It’s a popular and graphically impressive game from a major studio, but it’s also coming to the Mac years after it initially arrived on PCs and consoles.
Cyberpunk’s graphics settings show where the Mac could have advantages as a gaming platform, though. Like PCs, Apple Silicon Macs are available at all kinds of price and performance levels, from the low-end fanless MacBook Air to the top-tier M3 Ultra Mac Studio. But unlike PCs, where developers can’t account for all of the possible CPU, GPU, motherboard, storage, and RAM configurations, Windows versions, and graphics driver updates, the Mac comes in a more finite number of configurations with more tightly controlled software. This makes it easier for developers to target and tune for specific hardware.
Case in point, Cyberpunk’s “For this Mac” preset. Unlike the PC game’s Steam Deck preset, this isn’t a fixed collection of specific settings made with one particular hardware configuration in mind. Rather, it’s a dynamic preset that chooses different settings based on which specific Mac hardware you’re running the game on. An M1 Mac using this preset would get different settings than an M4 Max Mac using the same preset, and players can choose it knowing that they ought to get reasonably smooth and consistent performance with the best settings that their individual Mac can reasonably handle. (The one setting “For this Mac” doesn’t touch is ray-tracing, which can be manually enabled on M3- and M4-series Macs with the GPU hardware to support it but which won’t be turned on automatically.)
