Dying Light on Mac: How to Play & Benchmarks

Set in a city devastated by a mysterious epidemic, you spend your days exploring a dangerous and open city, scavenging for supplies and crafting weapons. With your parkour skills, you can explore and travel wherever you want; verticality is an important feature, you’ll want to think in three dimensions.

The fun begins at night when the zombies and other mysterious and worse enemies go on the attack, forcing you to use those weapons and skills to survive until dawn. Featuring single-player, multiplayer, and four-player cooperative modes, Dying Light more than fills your need for a zombie apocalypse shooter.

But what does it take to run this zombie/parkour masterpiece on macOS? How well can YOUR Mac run Dying Light? Can it run on M1 Macs?

Can you play Dying Light on Mac?

You can absolutely play Dying Light on your Mac, including Intel and Apple Silicon Models. Even if the official system requirements don’t mention M1 or M2 Macs, our benchmarks confirm the game runs fine on Apple Silicon Macs.

In spite of still running on the deprecated and outdated OpenGL graphics API, the game can still deliver surprisingly good performance, especially for a highly detailed first-person shooter featuring enormous environments. M1 Macs can easily get the job done, but what about Intel Macs? More on that below.

Art	Game	Genre	64-bit?	64-bit	API	M1 Support
	Dying Light	Shooter	Yes		OpenGL	Rosetta

Dying Light on Mac: Everything you need to know

Dying Light is a survival game set in a devastated open world. A mysterious epidemic ravaged the world, and you’re left scavenging for supplies and crafting weapons to defend yourself from hordes of zombies.

This all sounds great, but the best part is that Techland delivered an Enhanced Edition, which includes a massive expansion, a year’s worth of DLC, improved visuals, major gameplay enhancements, and more. Dying Light also supports Steam Play and Cross-platform multiplayer. Enough to make this my favorite shooter right now.

One more thing… While this is a demanding game, it always worked great, even on our lower-end test machine. That said, you’ll still want a fairly hearty Mac to enjoy it fully.

Dying Light Mac requirements

These are the game’s official Mac requirements:

How to play Dying Light on Mac

As mentioned before, Dying Light runs natively on macOS, including Intel-based Macs and M1/M2 Macs.

The game does require Rosetta 2 to run on Apple Silicon Macs. But Rosetta 2 works so seamlessly (it installs automatically the first time it detects an Intel-based app), and it integrates so well with macOS that the experience is virtually the same as running a native Apple Silicon Mac.

This means Dying Light can run on macOS without requiring any third-party software. Therefore, we won’t waste your time talking about Parallels, Crossover (both excellent tools, but only useful for Windows-exclusive games…), or Streaming services.

Can you play Dying Light on Mac? M1 and Intel Benchmarks

These are the ARK: Survival Evolved M1 benchmarks we have gathered so far:

As a reminder, this is how we describe the different levels of performance:

• Below 20 FPS: Unplayable: Laggy gameplay, full of stutters and slowdowns.
• 20-30 FPS: Borderline: Can be OK in slow-paced games. Still, not optimal.
• 30-45 FPS: Playable: Acceptable for most (most gaming consoles do this).
• 45-60 FPS: Smooth: Fluid gameplay, with no perceivable stutters.
• 60+ FPS: Very Smooth: For hardcore and professional players, a luxury for most.

Into first-person shooters? These are our favorites:

Game	★ Best Overall	Runner-Up	Best Value
	Borderlands 2	Metro: Exodus	Call of Duty: Black Ops 3
Genre	Co-op	Survival Horror	Competitive
Release date	2012	2021	2015
Metascore	89	82	81
Our rating	★★★★★ Full Review	★★★★☆ Full review	★★★★☆
Requirements	✅ Not Demanding	⚠️ Demanding	✅ Not Demanding
Check Price	Humble Bundle	Check Price	Steam

Intel Mac benchmarks

We previously tested the game on these Intel Macs:

• iMac (5K, 27-inch, Late 2014): 3.5 GHz Intel Core i5, 8 GB RAM, AMD Radeon R9 M290X (2GB)
• MacBook Pro (13-inch, Late 2016): 2.0 GHz Intel Core i5, 8 GB RAM, Intel Iris Graphics 540 (1.5GB)
• MacBook Pro (13-inch, Late 2013): 2.4 GHz Intel Core i5, 8 GB RAM, Intel Iris 5100 (1.5GB)

The game was tested on Medium settings and 720p resolution in order to include the older 2013 MacBook Pro:

• iMac (5K, 27-inch, Late 2014): 60 FPS
• MacBook Pro (13-inch, Late 2016): 36.3 FPS
• MacBook Pro (13-inch, Late 2013): 17.1 FPS