After GeForce Now on Steam Deck, Steam will finally get a proper version on new Macs. As a reminder, Steam is the leading seller of video games on PC. Despite this status, the Steam app experience on Macs with Apple Silicon chips was frankly not glorious, as we indicated in our Mac mini M4 review.
This is easily explained: Steam had never done the job properly and was resorting to tinkering. The application used Rosetta2, an on-the-fly translator of the x86 instruction set, thus allowing apps designed for Intel-based Macs to run on Apple Silicon chips. A patch that led to less than stellar performance and numerous slowdowns.
The end of Rosetta2 forces Steam to act
With the Cupertino company having recently announced the upcoming end of support for Rosetta2, Valve, which owns Steam, had to find a solution. As usual, the Bellevue company has already deployed an open beta of a dedicated MacOS application. Under the hood, Valve has gotten rid of the biggest bottleneck of the application by switching the Chromium Embedded Framework, which allows a Chromium-based browser to be displayed in an application, from the “Intel Only” setting to Apple Silicon.
Based on our own observations, this brings a host of benefits:
- Faster startup;
- The application is more responsive;
- Smoother loading of images and videos.
How to activate the beta?
Here are the steps to install the Steam Apple Silicon beta on your Mac:
- Open the Steam application;
- Go to the Settings interface menu;
- Look for the Beta drop-down menu and select “Steam Beta Update”;
- After a brief download and reboot, you're ready to enjoy.
Source: 9to5Mac
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