The critically acclaimed Cyberpunk 2077 from developer CD Projekt Red (CDPR) is making its way to Apple Silicon Macs next year – and I’m starting to wonder if Apple’s newly announced M4 Mac mini ($599 / £599 / AU$999) could compete with next-gen consoles like Sony’s PS5 Pro with more triple-A title additions like this.
The first-person action RPG proved to be a huge success on console and Windows PCs, despite a rocky launch that sent the developer back to the drawing board. Now that the game is stable in terms of bugs and performance and has a great major expansion in the form of Phantom freedomit seems like now is the perfect time to port it to Macs.
Apple’s list of triple-A games is constantly expanding, as we’ve seen with the Resident Evil 4 remake, Death Stranding Director’s CutAnd Baldur’s Gate 3. Among this lineup are CDPRs Cyberpunk 2077 may be the most demanding of them all in terms of hardware requirements – but it looks like even the base M4 version of the new Mac mini can handle all those virtual car chases and Braindances, based on its specs.
Sony could be in big trouble if the cheaper M4 Mac mini outperforms the PS5 Pro
A big part of this is the fact that Apple has done that Finally moved away from 8GB of unified memory as a baseline for Mac devices – a gaming performance nightmare on the cheaper configurations of earlier M-series Macs, as that RAM was shared between the CPU and integrated GPU. Now that the base M4 Mac mini has 16GB, high performance while gaming seems like a stronger possibility (although it’s still clear that Apple’s primary focus isn’t gaming right now).
Now, Apple still has a long way to go when it comes to gaming on Macs – especially since games arrive on the platform much later than on Windows PCs and consoles, and many gamers simply don’t recognize it as a legitimate gaming brand. Despite this, Cyberpunk 2077‘s addition is a huge indication of how great the new M4 chips could be for gaming.
Not only is the entry-level configuration of the M4 Mac mini much more compact and a bit cheaper than Sony’s PS5 Pro (which starts at $699 / £699 / AU$1,119.95), but on paper it looks like it could potentially outperform the improved console. Of course, this may not translate into superiority in the real world; optimizing a game for the PS5 is easier for developers, and the console’s bulky chassis means it has much better cooling than the tiny Mac mini. Still, Apple’s Macs are well within reach of strong competition in the gaming hardware space, especially if game developers continue to port major titles to the platform.
We’ve already seen the backlash that came from the price announcement – there’s a plethora of Windows gaming PC builds that can perform close to the PS5 Pro within a similar price range, so Apple’s Mac mini could make many reconsider bring the value of the Pro console and consider this little computer as their new living room gaming machine…
