Valve has silently updated the Steam client to run natively on Apple Silicon Mac computers.
The stable version of Steam for Mac still requires Apple's Rosetta 2 environment on modern Mac computers
Photo Credit: Valve
Steam for Mac just got one step closer to becoming a native Apple Silicon app. With the latest beta release that rolled out to testers on Thursday, the Steam client and its helper app now run natively on Mac computers with an M series chip. With Steam's upcoming transition to a Universal app, it should offer faster performance and efficient memory consumption than the stable version, which relies on Apple's translation (emulation) environement, which lets older apps run on modern Mac computers.
The release notes for the Steam client beta published on Friday reveal that both the main Steam client and the Steam Helper app run natively on Mac models with Apple Silicon. This means that Valve has finally updated the Steam app's code to run directly on Apple Silicon chips, which means that it won't need Apple's Rosetta 2 environment.
Beta testers who have updated to the latest version of Steam for Mac have reported that the native version of the app runs much faster than the previous version. The app takes less time to launch, and navigating to the Library, Store, and Community tabs is now much faster.
The Steam client relies on Chromium for the app's interface, and the stable version of the app remains extremely sluggish on modern Mac models. However, an upcoming update should bring the native app to the stable update channel, bringing these performance improvements to all Steam users.
Developers began launching native versions of their applications for Mac computers in the months after Apple launched the first Mac models with an M1 chip in November 2020. Over the coming years, many other app developers switched over to Universal apps that run natively on Apple Silicon chips, while a few other apps still use Rosetta 2 to run on the company's recent computers.
Valve's decision to roll out a native version of Steam for Mac comes shortly after Apple announced that it macOS Tahoe will be the last OS upgrade for Mac computers with Intel processors. An updated developer document also reveals that Rosetta 2 will be deprecated when macOS 28 is released in 2027, and Apple will keep a portion of its translation layer to support older games that are not updated to run on modern Mac models.
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