Steam native for Apple Silicon: Better gaming on the Mac
Until now, the makers at Valve have relied on Apple's Rosetta 2 translation layer for their Steam client for macOS, but that will soon be history.
Mac with Steam client: Apple Silicon will soon be five, and now Valve is joining in.
(Image: Valve)
In November, Apple Silicon will celebrate its fifth birthday on the Mac. At the same time, the Intel era at Apple is coming to an end: macOS 26 will be the last version of the Mac operating system that still runs on computers with the old chip. This makes it all the more surprising that the notoriously small software manufacturer Valve has not yet managed to port its gaming client Steam to Apple's ARM computers. Instead, its macOS app has been using Apple's in-house x86 translation layer Rosetta 2 for years. But Valve Corporation is now also a believer in progress: the games company from Bellevue, Washington, is working on an Apple Silicon version of Steam for macOS.
Crashes, but fewer lags
Valve is spreading the good news on its official beta website. This is because the brand-new client is not yet final, but only available in a preliminary version. The first version of the Steam client, which runs natively on Apple Silicon, was released on June 12. However, it was not really stable: in the following beta on June 16, the first crash bug had to be fixed, followed two betas later (on June 18, i.e. yesterday) by a regression that made updates impossible. The only solution was to force the app to close and restart it.
It is not yet known when the Steam client will finally be released Apple-silicon-native. However, the beta already has advantages: it starts much faster and even navigation through the application, i.e. the library and Valve Store, is more responsive. Incidentally, the internal code is Chromium code, which should have made porting from x86 to ARM easier, but this was apparently not the case here.
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Beta can be tested
The Steam client is only used to find and purchase new games and then to install (externally if necessary) and manage them. The actual games can in turn use their own architecture.
Fortunately, numerous titles available via Steam have long since been adapted for Apple Silicon. To try out the new client, you must first become part of the beta program. This can be done via the settings. But beware: the download is over 200 MB in size.
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