After a years-long wait, Steam for Mac is finally a native Apple Silicon app. Or about to be. Valve quietly rolled out the new version as part of a beta update, and you can try it right now.
Until now, Steam has relied entirely on Rosetta 2 to function on Apple Silicon Macs. To many users, that meant extra overhead, slower performance, and a clunky experience across the board, especially in the Chromium-based UI that powers much of the Steam client.
And now with the Rosetta 2 sunset on the horizon, Steam is finally making the jump.
Faster, smoother, and finally native
In the new beta, Steam is now a fully optimized Universal app. That means dramatically faster launch times, noticeably more responsive scrolling and navigation, and smoother access to Store and Community pages.
Under the hood, the key change is that Valve has moved the Chromium Embedded Framework from Intel-only to Apple Silicon. That cuts out one of the biggest performance bottlenecks in the entire app.
Given how sluggish the client could feel before, the difference should be instantly noticeable. Even basic actions like loading your Library or switching tabs will now feel far more fluid.
Andrew Tsai’s performance comparison between the two:
How to enable the beta
If you want to try the native version today, here’s how to opt in:
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