Bringing Cyberpunk 2077 to Mac

Garrett Austin (Apple Game Performance) introduces guest Paweł Sasko (Associate Game Director, CD PROJEKT RED) to share how Cyberpunk 2077: Ultimate Edition was brought to Mac with great performance across a wide range of devices.

An overview of the game — an open-world RPG set in Night City — and why it remains an industry benchmark: dense scene complexity and streaming, realistic lighting and materials, and demanding ray tracing and path tracing modes.

The motivation for the port: CD PROJEKT RED's long history on Apple platforms, Apple silicon hardware maturing enough to hit a serious quality bar, and the opportunity to reach more players.

Defining what "doing it properly" means via a three-part quality bar — visual fidelity, stable performance, and native feel — then executing the port: native builds, an adapted data pipeline, an architecture bridge, Metal Shader Converter, the native Metal rendering foundation, and MetalFX Upscaling for scalable performance.

Using Apple's Game Porting Toolkit to evaluate the Windows build in a translated environment before writing code — gauging feasibility, gathering CPU/GPU pressure signals, and identifying focus areas using profiling data, Metal HUD, and per-thread breakdowns to build a production roadmap.

Turning the working build into a first-launch experience that feels native to macOS — adopting platform features across windowing and app switching, input devices, display, audio, and cloud saves.

A device-based graphics preset that detects each Mac's hardware and auto-configures optimal settings — target FPS, MetalFX with Dynamic Resolution Scaling, resolution bounds, V-Sync, and HDR — tuned per device and demoed live in Dogtown.

Recommended actions: try the Game Porting Toolkit evaluation environment, analyze performance with Metal HUD, plan a great first-launch experience, and explore the related "Speedrun your game port with agentic coding" and "Find and fix performance issues in your Metal games" sessions.