Baldur's Gate 3 is coming to the Mac soon with some surprising spec requirements

News
By Oliver Haslam
published

Your Mac will probably play it just fine.

Baldurs Gate 3 keyart
(Image credit: Larian Studios)

Mac gaming is still in a precarious position despite some progress in recent years, but one of the year's biggest titles is about to land on an Apple computer near you.

Larian Studios has confirmed that Baldur's Gate 3 is coming to the Mac on September 21 —  a day before another big release in the shape of the iPhone 15 and iPhone 15 Pro.

The addition of Baldur's Gate 3 to Mac's arsenal is a notable one given not only its popularity on PC and PS5 to date but also the fact that the specification requirements from Larian Studios appear to open the door to a lot of Mac owners.

Apple silicon fights the good fight

Baldur's Gate 3 hails from the world of Dungeons and Dragons and will see gamers gather their party "and return to the Forgotten Realms in a tale of fellowship and betrayal, sacrifice and survival, and the lure of absolute power." Larian Studios says that "mysterious abilities are awakening inside you, drawn from a mind flayer parasite planted in your brain."

That all sounds very interesting indeed, but that's nothing compared to the good news you'll find when you scroll to the bottom of the game's Steam page to find the minimum and required system specifications.

Starting with the minimum requirements, we're told that any Mac running a modern Apple silicon chip will be good to go. That includes any Mac with an M1 chip with 8GB of RAM installed, including the base model M1 MacBook Air, MacBook Pro, and Mac mini. Gamers can expect to be able to play on low or medium settings with any of those machines.

But what about playing on more impressive settings? Larian Studios says that M1 Macs with 16GB of RAM will be able to do just that, which is good news for owners of 14- and 16-inch MacBook Pros in particular. Those Macs all ship with at least 16GB of RAM as standard, not to mention upgraded Pro and Max chips.

Have an older Mac? A 2.6GHz Quad-Core Intel Core i7 and 8GB of RAM with an AMD Radeon 460 should be enough to make the game run. Baldur's Gate looks like a strong contender for game of the year with its astonishing Metacritic scores, and Mac users can get in on the action on September 21. 

Oliver Haslam
Oliver Haslam
Contributor

Oliver Haslam has written about Apple and the wider technology business for more than a decade with bylines on How-To Geek, PC Mag, iDownloadBlog, and many more. He has also been published in print for Macworld, including cover stories. At iMore, Oliver is involved in daily news coverage and, not being short of opinions, has been known to 'explain' those thoughts in more detail, too. Having grown up using PCs and spending far too much money on graphics card and flashy RAM, Oliver switched to the Mac with a G5 iMac and hasn't looked back. Since then he's seen the growth of the smartphone world, backed by iPhone, and new product categories come and go. Current expertise includes iOS, macOS, streaming services, and pretty much anything that has a battery or plugs into a wall. Oliver also covers mobile gaming for iMore, with Apple Arcade a particular focus. He's been gaming since the Atari 2600 days and still struggles to comprehend the fact he can play console quality titles on his pocket computer.