Steam Beta Adds Native Apple Silicon Support for Mac

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

steam apple logo
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."

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Top Rated Comments

pinkkie Avatar
4 weeks ago
nice, now do all the games
Score: 30 Votes (Like | Disagree)
Leon Ze Professional Avatar
4 weeks ago
Interesting and great news for gaming on the Mac. Finally the gaming wheels are slowly turning and opening up further opportunities.
Score: 12 Votes (Like | Disagree)
Haiku_Oezu Avatar
4 weeks ago
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
Score: 11 Votes (Like | Disagree)
ghostface147 Avatar
4 weeks ago
Can we please get updates to the half life/portal series to work on Apple silicon please?
Score: 9 Votes (Like | Disagree)
roronl Avatar
4 weeks ago
Done; first impression is good!
Score: 7 Votes (Like | Disagree)
DunedinD Avatar
4 weeks ago
About time the Portal games got a Mac update, to be 64-bit and now Apple Silicon binaries.
Score: 6 Votes (Like | Disagree)