The megaguest update for Cyberpunk 2077: Ultimate Edition has now been released by CD Projekt Red, and counter-path tracing rendering finally graces the Mac App Store. From a compatibility standpoint, this update brings the Mac version résumés alongside their counterparts for PC on GOG, Steam, and Epic Games Store, affording the player full thunderbolt on the visuals of neon-stylized Night City. Some players were ecstatic by it, while others were just looking for the fixes, optimizations, and some never-arrived features.
Path tracing is a big deal-it’s the holistic solution to lighting, in the sense that it makes reflections, shadows, and global illumination seem insanely real. That said, for Cyberpunk 2077 at least, Mac users holding M3 and M4 chips have just come into a class of graphical demand usually reserved for the best of high-end PCs. Not all can be happy now. Around have been complaints about how the default settings actually turned on ultra-high presets even when Macs could barely reach a stable 30fps. Kangz Pöti, a famous tech guru, condemned CD Projekt Red for not better setting optimization, referring to the fact that there exists community guides to help get better performance without sacrificing visual quality.
The whole Xbox community is shouting in unison. SolarPunk Addicted straight-up asked for an update on VRR for Xbox Series X, calling the implementation “broken AF.” Meanwhile, PlayStation users are sitting pretty, with one user, Daniel, praising the stability and 40fps “quality mode” for PS5, something Series X does not have yet. It is a real platform divide, and Xbox gamers genuinely feel left out.
Oh, but the drama is in the comments section. Some players massively roast others for even caring about the Mac performance (“Who the hell plays Cyberpunk on a MacBook?”), while others beg for basic fixes like disabling vignette effects without mods. That’s when people start bringing up the New Game Plus debate–Ubisoft put it in Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora, so why in the hell hasn’t CDPR put it in Cyberpunk all this time? The replies here are a complete mess of frustration, memes, and console wars, with PC elitists like PC_IS_KING🤴 trolling “patch-begging peasants.”
Oh, and we’re not wrong to throw in a random guy asking if Intel-based iMacs are supported (spoiler: they aren’t, at least not well). Or another dissenter who just won’t rebuy it on PS5 for better performance. Or someone chalking up crashing issues by explaining to the other person that “all you have to do is log out of everything and uninstall the game”—yeah, that’ll totally fix it.
So, by end of the day, the update is a victory for Mac gamers who have been waiting for Cyberpunk 2077 at its full glitter. Well, for anyone else, the patch notes might as well say, “Here’s some cool tech, now go argue in the replies.” CD Projekt Red has lots of plates spinning, and while path tracing on a Mac is quite the flex, the things that matter to the players are still yet to be tackled. Maybe next time.
