Steam finally goes native on Apple Silicon, here’s how to try it – 9to5Mac

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:

1. Open the Steam app on your Mac.
2. In the menu bar, click Steam > Settings > Interface.
3. Find the Beta Participation section and choose Steam Beta Update from the dropdown.
4. Restart Steam to download the updated version (around 230MB).
5. Confirm you’re running the native version by checking Activity Monitor — you should see Steam listed as “Kind: Apple”.

Great timing

This update couldn’t come at a better moment: earlier this week, Apple confirmed that Rosetta 2 will be deprecated in a future version of macOS. That means Intel-only apps like Steam, if left unupdated, would eventually stop working.

Apple says Rosetta 2 will stick around in some capacity to support older or unmaintained games, but it’s unclear what that means for app launchers like Steam, especially with Apple now pushing its own Game Porting Toolkit 2.

Here is Apple’s official statement:

macOS Tahoe will be the last release for Intel-based Mac computers. Those systems will continue to receive security updates for 3 years.

Rosetta was designed to make the transition to Apple silicon easier, and we plan to make it available for the next two major macOS releases – through macOS 27 – as a general-purpose tool for Intel apps to help developers complete the migration of their apps. Beyond this timeframe, we will keep a subset of Rosetta functionality aimed at supporting older unmaintained gaming titles, that rely on Intel-based frameworks.

Are you running the beta? Have you noticed a difference? Let us know in the comments.