Apple selected Cyberpunk 2077: Ultimate Edition as the 2026 game winner in its Visuals and Graphics category. The company praised the title's interiors, character work and vehicle design, but also singled out the way the port uses Apple silicon and Metal.

That technical detail matters. Cyberpunk is not exactly the sort of game developers choose when they want to demonstrate how effortlessly a platform handles graphics. Night City became one of the PC industry's recurring showcase workloads for ray tracing, path tracing and successive generations of upscaling technology.

The Mac build was engineered as a native port

CD PROJEKT RED released the macOS Ultimate Edition in July 2025. It includes the base game and Phantom Liberty and was built for Apple silicon rather than delivered through a Windows compatibility layer.

Metal handles the graphics side, with the available feature set scaling according to the Mac running the game. The result has now collected two Apple awards in less than a year: Mac Game of the Year in 2025 and the 2026 Apple Design Award for Visuals and Graphics.

For this Mac is more interesting than another preset called High

One of the port's platform-specific features is a graphics preset literally named For this Mac. Instead of exposing one fixed configuration across the entire Apple silicon range, it adjusts resolution and graphics settings according to the available hardware.

That is useful on a platform where an Apple silicon label alone tells very little about GPU capability. A base chip and a high-end Max variant can sit several performance classes apart while running the same native application.

Automatic settings do not remove the underlying workload, of course. They give CD PROJEKT RED a way to establish a sensible baseline before users start adjusting individual options themselves.

The award arrives after years of technical reconstruction

There is an obvious historical irony here. Cyberpunk 2077 launched in December 2020 with severe technical problems, particularly on previous-generation consoles, and the PlayStation version was temporarily removed from Sony's digital store.

The game that Apple is rewarding in 2026 is the product of years of changes after that release. Update 2.0 rebuilt major gameplay systems, Phantom Liberty arrived alongside another substantial technical push, and the Ultimate Edition subsequently expanded to both Nintendo Switch 2 and Apple silicon Macs.

Current versions continue to receive maintenance as well. Patch 2.31 is available across PC, PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X|S, macOS and Nintendo Switch 2.

Apple announced the 2026 Design Award winners on June 2. CD PROJEKT RED formally marked Cyberpunk 2077's win on June 8.