Developer CD Projekt Red’s (CDPR) critically acclaimed Cyberpunk 2077 is coming to Apple Silicon Macs next year – and I’m starting to wonder if Apple’s recently announced M4 Mac mini ($599 / £599 / AU$999) can compete with next-gen consoles like Sony’s PS5 Pro with more triple-A title additions like this one.
The first-person action RPG proved to be a huge success on consoles and Windows PC, despite a rocky launch that sent the developer back to the drawing board. Now that the game is bug- and performance-stable, and has a huge expansion in the form of Phantom Freedom, it seems like the perfect time to port it to Macs.
Apple’s list of triple-A games is growing all the time, as we’ve seen with the Resident Evil 4 remake, Death Stranding Director’s Cut and Baldur’s Gate 3. This line-up includes CDPR’s Cyberpunk 2077 which is perhaps the most demanding of them all in terms of hardware requirements – but it appears that even the base M4 version of the new Mac mini will be able to 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 that Apple did it. It eventually moved away from 8GB of unified memory as the base for Macs—a nightmare for gaming performance on the lower-end configurations of previous M-series Macs, since 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 (though it’s still clear that Apple’s primary focus right now isn’t on gaming).
Apple still has a long way to go when it comes to gaming on Macs—especially since games came to the platform much later than they did on Windows PCs and consoles, and many gamers simply don’t recognize it as a legitimate gaming brand. Still, the addition of Cyberpunk 2077 is a huge indication of just how great the new M4 chips can be for gaming.
Not only is the entry-level M4 Mac mini configuration much more compact and marginally cheaper than Sony’s PS5 Pro (which starts at $699 / £699 / AU$1,119.95), but on paper it seems like it could potentially outperform the beefed-up console. Of course, that might not translate into superiority in the real world; optimizing a game for the PS5 is easier for developers, and the console’s bulkier chassis means it has much better cooling than the diminutive Mac mini. Still, Apple’s Macs are well within reach of some strong competition in the gaming hardware space, especially if game developers continue to port big titles to the platform.
We’ve already seen the backlash that came from the pricing announcement – there are a plethora of Windows gaming PC builds that perform nearly as well as the PS5 Pro within a similar price range, so Apple’s Mac mini could make many reconsider bringing the value of the Pro console to market and consider this little computer as their new living room gaming machine…