Playing The Witcher on a MacBook Air M1? It is now possible

The first two opuses of The Witcher license are now optimized for Apple Silicon chips and their ARM architecture. Excellent news which unfortunately does not yet extend to the third part of the franchise.

Will play The Witcher first of the name (in its version “ Enhanced Edition “) Or The Witcher 2: Assassins of Kings on a simple MacBook Air M1 is now possible in the best conditions. Through a post shared on account X of the licenseCD Projekt RED confirms that it has optimized the first two parts of the saga for Apple Silicon chips and their ARM architecture.

In detail, we learn that this optimization is provided thanks to an update deployed on Steam, GOG and on the Mac AppStore, where the two games are also distributed. With her, The Witcher1 and 2 therefore become fully compatible with the M1, M2 and M3 chips. The only prerequisite to take advantage of this new feature is to have an Apple Silicon Mac running macOS Ventura (or a more recent version).

The Witcher 3 not (yet?) concerned

Note that this optimization unfortunately does not concern The Witcher 3. Much more ambitious, the third opus of the franchise is therefore put aside, at least for the moment. The reason ? The first two games probably required less work to be ported from the x86 architecture to ARM.

As the specialized site points out iPhoneSoft , it is also a safe bet that the developers used the Game Porting Toolkit, presented by Apple during WWDC 2023, to carry out these two ports more easily. Logically, the two titles should also benefit from the improvements of macOS Sonoma (latest version of macOS to date) dedicated to Gaming.

If nothing tells us that The Witcher 3will not benefit from the same treatment a little later (this would also be logical a fortiori given the good graphics capabilities observed on the latest M3 chips), we must therefore be content for the moment with The Witcher1 and 2.

And if the first opus shows the weight of the years both visually and in terms of gameplay ,The Witcher 2: Assassins of Kingsstill looks great 12 years after its original release on PC. The title also benefits from a particularly careful branching storyline which has nothing to envy of CD Projekt’s more recent productions.