Steam And 3DMark Team Up For Game-Changing Apple Silicon Native Support

Some people (including yours truly) may well be wondering if Apple will ever fully commit to gaming on Macs instead of just nibbling at the edges. There's definitely movement in that particular area, though, as Valve has just released a beta version of Steam that's native to Apple Silicon chips, as did UL with 3DMark.

Up until now, Steam on macOS worked fine, but it was an x86 binary that relied on Rosetta 2 emulation layer to function on Macs with M-series chips, as is the case with many contemporary games released for the platform. The new Steam beta changes this, with a fresh release that targets Apple Silicon chips natively and does away with Rosetta 2 entirely. There appear to be no UI or experiential changes at all, except for the fact that the new client is predictably faster and more responsive than the previous emulated version, as confirmed by Youtuber Andrew Tsai.


This new version comes in at just the right time, since Apple has already announced that Rosetta 2 support is ending in fall 2027, and that the freshly released macOS Tahoe is the last one to support Intel-based Macs altogether. To get the new Steam beta going on your Mac, follow these steps: open Steam, go to Settings, then Interface, and in the Beta Participation selectors, pick "Steam Beta Update" in the drop-down menu. Restart Steam, and then in the macOS Activity Monitor, find Steam and verify that the Kind is "Apple."

In a related topic, UL has released a native version of its evergreen 3DMark application, perhaps looking to get in on the macOS gaming bandwagon. The application can conveniently be installed from Steam, making it a nice twofer if you're experimenting with gaming on your fruity machine. Having an industry-standard benchmark application that runs directly on M-series chips will be good for establishing a performance baseline for game developers and users both.

For its part, UL says the main reason it released this version was because it was seeing a lot of 3DMark scores submitted for virtual iOS devices running under macOS. Running 3DMark in this scenario negatively affected the scores, particularly on higher-end Macs, with the additional hitch that the frame rate was limited by host system's refresh rate. Prospective benchmarkers only need a Mac with an M-series chip running macOS 14 Sonoma and at least 8 GB of RAM.