Steam Beta Adds Native Apple Silicon Support for Mac

[MacRumors]

Valve has quietly released a Steam Client Beta that runs natively on Apple Silicon, finally ending its reliance on the Rosetta 2 translation layer.

The updated Steam client eliminates the performance overhead that plagued Mac gamers since Apple's transition to its own chips. Steam's Chromium-based interface, which could slow to a crawl on occasion, now runs directly on Apple Silicon rather than through Intel emulation.

Early testers report dramatically faster launch times and smoother navigation through the Store and Library. The difference should be immediately apparent, with basic actions like switching tabs feeling fluid rather than laggy.

Apple announced this week at WWDC that macOS Tahoe will be the last version supporting Intel Macs, with Rosetta 2 set for deprecation. Starting with macOS 28, Apple said that only a limited version of Rosetta 2 will remain available for older games that rely on Intel-based frameworks

Mac users can access the beta through Steam's settings. Navigate to Interface, select "Steam Beta Update" from the Client Beta Participation dropdown, then restart to download the roughly 230MB update.

You can verify the native version is running by checking Activity Monitor – Steam should appear with "Kind: Apple" rather than "Kind: Intel."

Article Link: Steam Beta Adds Native Apple Silicon Support for Mac

 

[Spike1999]

Oh finally 👀

 

[pinkkie]

nice, now do all the games

 

[roronl]

Done; first impression is good!

 

[Leon Ze Professional]

Interesting and great news for gaming on the Mac. Finally the gaming wheels are slowly turning and opening up further opportunities.

 

[WarmWinterHat]

I'm not a gamer and don't use Steam or have an account, but even I know that 90% of Steam games don't work on Apple Silicon....so..I guess this is sorta useful?

 

[DunedinD]

About time the Portal games got a Mac update, to be 64-bit and now Apple Silicon binaries.

 

[Haiku_Oezu]

Rumor has it Valve is going ARM for their next hardware platform so this is probably a byproduct of that (and also Apple announcing the deprecation of Rosetta 2)

On the open source side of things they’ve been working on making Proton work on ARM for a few months now

 

[iZac]

There's probably like 2 mac users in Valve who get fed up of struggling with it and took it upon themselves to fix the situation.

 

[Plutonius]

It affects the browsing and launching speed of Steam but the individual games still require an update, Many of the older MacOS games and all of the Crossover games require Rosetta 2. I don't know if Codeweaver is up to the challenge and most older MacOS games are no longer supported (no updates possible).

Apple said that they will keep a small Rosetta 2 subset to allow the older game compatibility but who trust them ?

Like many people, I'lll stay on the last MacOS version that has the full Rosetta 2.

 

[Donkey Man]

Interesting and great news for gaming on the Mac. Finally the gaming wheels are slowing turning and opening up further opportunities.

This doesn’t change zilt about gaming on the Mac - the only marginal improvement is a slightly faster Steam app on M-chip Macs; nothing else.
And no: CS2 still doesn’t exist natively on the Mac.

 

[NoIdentity]

5 years - wow

 

[ghostface147]

Can we please get updates to the half life/portal series to work on Apple silicon please?

 

[Entilzha]

Wow, it only took them…

*checks watch*

…just short of five years.

Wonder how long it’ll take MicroActiBlizz to do the same for the battle.net launcher.

 

[neuropsychguy]

This is great, but I never noticed any clear lag in Steam on my Macs (M1 or M4). There could have been some, but Rosetta 2 is really good. Changes to native Apple Silicon are much appreciated though!

 

[kirky29]

This is great, but I never noticed any clear lag in Steam on my Macs (M1 or M4). There could have been some, but Rosetta 2 is really good. Changes to native Apple Silicon are much appreciated though!

Really? The Steam client ran like horse cr*p on both my M1 and M4 Macs. This beta feels night and day better.

 

[apparatchik]

It affects the browsing and launching speed of Steam but the individual games still require an update, Many of the older MacOS games and all of the Crossover games require Rosetta 2. I don't know if Codeweaver is up to the challenge and most older MacOS games are no longer supported (no updates possible).

Apple said that they will keep a small Rosetta 2 subset to allow the older game compatibility but who trust them ?

Like many people, I'lll stay on the last MacOS version that has the full Rosetta 2.

Codeweaver has already said they will circumvent Rosetta 2 and will work on a solution.

 

[neuropsychguy]

I don't use Steam or have an account, but even I know that 90% of Steam games don't work on Apple Silicon....so..I guess this is sorta useful?

That's a pretty good estimate, although low. There are about 110,000 games on Steam (https://steamdb.info/stats/releases/), although it's likely at least some are no longer available. This site suggests the current total is about 101,000 games (https://backlinko.com/steam-users).

There are about 24,000 macOS games (https://store.steampowered.com/macos?facets13268=7:0), which means that about 24% of the Steam catalog are playable on macOS. Few will be 32-bit, which means most are playable on Apple Silicon. Further, through emulation, additional games can be run on macOS, however people doing that are a tiny minority of Steam users.

Steam users are overwhelmingly not running macOS -- only about 1.85% (https://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey/) -- but it's not only because of a lack of games. With nearly 25% of Steam games available on macOS, there are many options for games.

 

[neuropsychguy]

Really? The Steam client ran like horse cr*p on both my M1 and M4 Macs. This beta feels night and day better.

I don't know what to say. I have a Windows system with an AMD 5900X and Steam never seemed more responsive on that than on my Macs (including my base model M4 Mini). But maybe the 5900X is getting long in the tooth (it's still plenty fast). Launching speeds were similar (within a few seconds) and I didn't notice any differences in using the Windows or Mac version. It's possible I just ignored it, but I am highly sensitive to stutters and lag. 🤷‍♂️

 

[jayducharme]

nice, now do all the games

Exactly. I'm wondering how many older games will be broken by this change.

 

[baconcat_8964]

nice, now do all the games

not likely. many games have been left unmaintained since 2019. they haven't got upgraded to 64-bit yet.

 

[thefrost]

About time.

 

[walterpaisley]

Odd – I have the June 12th release but it still shows as Intel. I've tried deleting and reinstalling from scratch but still get the Intel binary. Anyone else run into this?

 

[Pezimak]

Rumor has it Valve is going ARM for their next hardware platform so this is probably a byproduct of that (and also Apple announcing the deprecation of Rosetta 2)

On the open source side of things they’ve been working on making Proton work on ARM for a few months now

Their is ‘some talk’ and speculation AMD may pull out of this handheld PC market thing as their isn’t much money in it. And the driver are a hassle. We shall see though but it could add credence to the rumour of an ARM powered Steam Deck.

 

[The_Gream]

Right now. I believe Apple could do something great, by opening up their own Studios/Publisher, start buying up game IPs and and doing remasters for so many games that where fun back in the day but got left behind.

They snuck billions into their Apple Car, they could do the same for the gaming community and probably have better results.