Steam Beta Adds Native Apple Silicon Support for Mac

[x86dude]

I am a small developer who plays Portal, Half-Life2 and Far Cry to relax.
Currently I run those on an x86 iMac and Parallels.

I can spend very good money to upgrade if these run on Apple Silicon.

But i’ve lost hope.

 

[HighwaySnowman]

and round and round goes the fallacy wheel. There are plenty of folks that own macs, and plenty of those game. Right now - they own windows and/or steam decks and/or linux boxes to do so as mac support is less than it could be.

So I'm not disagreeing with the reported numbers, nor the state of steam, only that there is a misrepresentation of potential mac gamers. I for one run Steam on my mac, it runs ok. Parallels back in the intel mac days did awesome for many windows games, but I haven't upgraded and seen what the AS version will do.

I don't play many games, and I don't do it often. But these days I either have to use an old Mac or a Windoze box if I want to play older games. They run just fine on Windoze 11. And when my home office desk already has 7 monitors on it, it's hard to find space for the appropriate old Mac.

 

[Wx_Man]

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

Yeah I read that too but that was from a blog post from Codeweavers like 2 years ago. They still haven’t released an Apple Silicon native version of Crossover yet and there won’t be a native Proton version until Codeweavers releases native Crossover first.

 

[ikir]

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.

In reality it exists

 

[ikir]

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?

It is the beta. Also the beta is faster but very bugged just wait

 

[Cervisia]

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

Steam is good news, but Rosetta 2 is terrible. Same as how 32 bit support killed perfectly running and still enjoyable games on Mac. Things like these why the Mac will never be a good gaming platform.

 

[Cervisia]

This is the elephant in the room people keep ignoring. People keep blaming Apple saying they do not care about Mac gamers at all. But for steam 24% of all the games are playable on the Mac yet only 2% of steam users play on Macs. I play steam games on my Mac and the selection is not perfect, but pretty good. Apple well knows these statistics so do not go out of there way to put power hungry nvidias in their desktops, which goes against their energy saving mantra, which i agree with.

With all that said the GPUs in the studios and mac pros, while not on par with top of the line nvidias, are much better than the intel days. Yet gamers still do not play on Apple silicon macs. People buy macs to get work done or take to college. Apple cant force its customers to do something they dont want to. I really wish there were more mac gamers, but thats not the case.

If I can't play a single game I want to play on a Mac, I'll look for another gaming platform, be it streaming, a console or a PC. And when I have that dedicated gaming platform, I'll play on that. And if that happens be a PC, then I might do some of my work on it, meaning a lower specced, way cheaper Mac will do. I was thinking about getting a MaxBook Pro with lots of ram. But buying a cheap Air and building a PC that can do both work and gaming better was the sane choice.

 

[Donkey Man]

In reality it exists

No, it does not - the fact that someone found a buried alpha version of the Mac OS port does not change that fact.

 

[Tanax]

and round and round goes the fallacy wheel. There are plenty of folks that own macs, and plenty of those game. Right now - they own windows and/or steam decks and/or linux boxes to do so as mac support is less than it could be.

So I'm not disagreeing with the reported numbers, nor the state of steam, only that there is a misrepresentation of potential mac gamers. I for one run Steam on my mac, it runs ok. Parallels back in the intel mac days did awesome for many windows games, but I haven't upgraded and seen what the AS version will do.

Sorry, what I meant was that there is a too small pool of gamers that are gaming on Mac, not that there are no gamers who also has a Mac. So yes, I agree, the potential gamers on Mac would be huge, but unfortunately the games that are released on Mac mostly suck, there's no wide spread software support, there's no legacy games support, Apple changing APIs and support from one generation to another, etc. If there were better support, gaming on Mac would be much bigger! The problem right now is that everyone who owns a Mac and wants to do serious gaming are forced to get a Windows/Linux machine (if they want PC gaming) or a console. And it's a shame. Macs finally have really great hardware now that could support great gaming experience.

 

[ErikGrim]

I am a small developer who plays Portal, Half-Life2 and Far Cry to relax.
Currently I run those on an x86 iMac and Parallels.

I can spend very good money to upgrade if these run on Apple Silicon.

But i’ve lost hope.

All of these run wonderful through Crossover.

 

[ErikGrim]

Yeah I read that too but that was from a blog post from Codeweavers like 2 years ago. They still haven’t released an Apple Silicon native version of Crossover yet and there won’t be a native Proton version until Codeweavers releases native Crossover first.

Wut?

 

[AgeOfSpiracles]

Did you just make up that rumor? It makes zero sense. The appeal of Steam is the enormous catalog.

No, they didn't make it up. There really is a rumor that the next Steam Deck will be arm based, for obvious reasons. That's not the only reason they'd add ARM64 support to Proton, but it's a reasonable one.

 

[rjp1]

No, they didn't make it up. There really is a rumor that the next Steam Deck will be arm based, for obvious reasons. That's not the only reason they'd add ARM64 support to Proton, but it's a reasonable one.

I mean never say never, but that doesn't sound likely. Adding another translation layer on a mobile device - it's just not feasible right now. I can't see them wanting better battery life at the expense of performance issues and/or compatibility.