Play in good conditions The Witcher 2 on a simple MacBook Air M1 is now possible. A tweet published a few days ago by CD Projekt tells us that the first two parts of the license The Witcher (The Witcher: Enhanced Edition And The Witcher 2: Assassins of Kings) are now fully optimized for Apple Silicon processors. In other words, they now work natively on the M1, M2 or M3 chips of the latest generations of Macs and MacBooks.
What about The Witcher 3 ?
In detail, we learn that this optimization is done through an update deployed on Steam, on GoG and on the Mac App Store. The only requirement to take advantage of it is to have a Mac equipped with an Apple Silicon processor, running macOS Ventura (or a more recent version of the system).
It should be noted that although he celebrated his 12th birthday, The Witcher 2 remains a relatively resource-intensive title. If you want to benefit from it in the best conditions, it would be better to use a Pro or Max chip, the latter being equipped with a solid GPU part. Older and less graphically demanding, The Witcher 1st of the name should work very well on all recent Macs and MacBooks.
There remains the question of The Witcher 3. The latter was not mentioned by CD Projekt, and for good reason: it was never launched on Mac.
Even if this were the case, we imagine that due to their advanced age, adapting the first two parts of the saga to the ARM design of Apple Silicon chips would have been easier anyway. To carry out this optimization of The Witcher 1 and 2, it’s a safe bet that CD Projekt developers used Apple’s Game Porting Toolkit, announced a few months ago during WWDC 2023.
Launched in 2015 and very successful visually, The Witcher 3 has for its part a particularly detailed open world, inevitably complex to carry on an operating system for which it was not originally developed, and on a different architecture what’s more.