Steam is now native on Apple Silicon, full optimization available now

Steam for Mac has entirely relied on Rosetta 2 to work on Apple Silicon, which is an emulator designed to allow software designed for Intel-based Macs to run on Apple Silicon.

When emulating from one system architecture to the next, there is a cost to performance, and in the case of Rosetta 2 and Steam, there was a significant hit when compared to Steam native. However, Apple is planning on sunsetting Rosetta 2 with macOS 28 as the era of Intel-based Mac software support comes to an end.

macOS 26 will be the last release for Intel-based Macs, meaning software designed for Intel-based Macs will need to become native on Apple Silicon to continue to receive top-of-the-line compatibility and optimizations with macOS.

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Valve has now officially bridged the gap between Intel-based Macs and Apple Silicon-based Macs with a new beta for Steam. Reports indicate the new beta adds dramatically faster launch times for Steam, noticeably more responsive scrolling, improved navigation of the client, and faster/smoother access to aspects of Steam such as the Store and Community pages.

If you own an Apple Silicon-based Mac, which is any M-series based device, and want Steam to run as well as it possibly can, follow the steps below to enable the new beta.

Improve Steam on M-series Macs

• Open the Steam app on your Mac
• In the menu bar, click Steam > Settings > Interface
• Find the Beta Participation section and choose Steam Beta Update from the dropdown
• Restart Steam to download the updated version (around 230MB)
• Confirm you're running the native version by checking Activity Monitor - you should see Steam listed as "Kind: Apple"