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Steam beta gets native Apple Silicon support — the only public Arm version of Steam
(www.tomshardware.com)
JUST DONT ADD AI
this post was submitted on 13 Jun 2025
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Steam hasn't forgotten about gaming on Mac, even if Apple has.
laughs with Apple AirBuds in ears
No hate but what is this even supposed to mean?
I think they may just be a mind melted apple fan boy. Its either that or apple managed to make those Cybermen earbuds from Doctor Who, ya know the ones from the episode with the Daleks and the dimensional rift.
THEY NEVER HAS ARM SUPPORT??
To be fair: How many games on Steam support ARM anyways?
True
I believe ARM will be the future, developers should not ignore it. Qualcomm has been doing the Snapdragon Elite processors in Windows laptops for a bit now, and they are quite snappy - there is definitely something there. LTT had mostly positive reactions to the Snapdragon laptops they tested, and Apple silicone Macs are just so insanely powerful.
I told my help desk manager at work that I would like to be the pilot user when we start getting Surface laptops with the Snapdragon Elite processors. My past 3 work-issued HP Elitebooks (860 G6/G8/G11) on Intel have all been so disappointing.
There's Proton for Apple sillicon IIRC
Probably was just for the old Intel Macs.
Proton/Wine could be used on OSX for a long time. Wine for ARM has also been a thing for a while. But it only worked with ARM Windows software.
Combining Wine with x86 emulation has also become a thing in the last few years. And rumor has it that Valve have beem dabbling in it as well for Deckard. But I don't think it's very widespread yet.
But that is probably about to change when Valve are increasing their ARM Mac efforts.
It’s a small company with very little resources, and they only take 30% cut of nearly all PC game sales so they couldn’t afford it. /s
Why would they prioritize resources into something with low demand..?
Because they are selling games on this platform today and the reasonable expectation would be that they properly support it. If they deem it too much of a cost then they can exit the market rather than half ass it.
There wasn't a reason to before but now they are doing it now because there's enough of a market to justify it...I'm not sure what you think they did so wrong
Have you used Steam on ARM Macs? Rosetta 2 is a dynamic recompiler which does badly when emulating things that recompile dynamically themselves, like web browsers, which Steam is essentially. Scrolling was choppy, power efficiency was bad. M1 and newer chips brute forced their way through this because they’re so fast but Steam performance was embarrassing.
And only adding Apple Silicon just now??? It's been out for 5 years!
Was thinking the same thing
I think it is because they are killing Rosetta support. Will this affect gaming?
Rosetta 2 is supposed to be available for older games only but I’m not sure how they’re planning to enforce that. Maybe some kind of whitelist? Either way it was a travesty that Valve didn’t bother before. Running what is essentially a full web browser through Rosetta couldn’t ever work well because of all of the recompilation already happening there.
I mean sure, but apple killing Rosetta support is also idiotic. I think that they just want to turn OSX into iOS which is just awful.
Apple doesn't care about maintaining compatibility. Look at their previous changes such as PowerPC to x86 and forcing 64-bit only applications.
Considering they just turned iPadOS into macOS--I doubt they're trying to turn macOS into iOS. They're just being their typical, stuck-up, stingy asshole selves. Use Metal, or die.
I was like "hey, Apple Silicon looks like a great turnaround!" and indeed it was--I love my M1 Max MacBook. Now, they're going backwards again. Frustratingly, they're also going forward with the launch of their OSes this year. It's a sidestep.
Again.
I, and others, are only playing this game so many times, so I have no idea what the strategy is.
Apple not keeping legacy cruft is why they were able to move to ARM so quickly. For all the grumbling about cutting 32-bit support couple of years ago, this is what allowed them to do that (among other things). And, as demonstrated, developers like Valve take action only when they are forced to. Windows and Linux on ARM are stuck in the mud with no end in sight while Apple is almost done with the transition.
Linux on ARM is stuck in the mud? Huh? Everything works fine on ARM, including the desktop. There are like a billion ARM devices running Linux right now.
Or did you mean Linux on Apple hardware? Because that's by design.
Since we’re talking about Steam here for example, Valve have not even bothered to release a 64-bit x86 client, let alone Arm client, except for Mac.
Right, I'm not talking about Steam, I don't think misk was either, the context is Apple transitioning to ARM silicon.
Also Steam definitely runs native 64 bit on x64 systems. It's intended to run in either environment, and so will have 32 bit deps, but if you start Steam, the actual executables you're running (e.g. ~/.local/share/Steam/ubuntu12_64/steamwebhelper) are 64 bit ELFs when needed. And, of course, games run in 64 bits and link to a 64 bit steam client library.
Steam for Linux is mixed 32/64, unfortunately the main executable (~/.local/share/Steam/ubuntu12_32/steam) and its associated steamclient library continues to be 32-bit only and runs with a couple of horribly dated libraries in the mix. That process does pretty much everything aside from the UI.
I mean, yeah, that's what happens when you still want to be 32 bit compatible. It's also why I said they were ELF64 when needed. My only point was that it's not like Valve just shipped a bunch of 32 bit binaries and called it a day or x64 support was some kind of after thought that needs future support.
Oh really? Nice, that's news to me. Last I checked (admittedly not recently) it needed a bunch of 32-bit libraries installed to even start the client.
No, I meant that by setting the same bar for both platforms or by using same evaluation metrics.
Supporting native software is trivial and everyone can do it obviously. How well does Linux on ARM support proprietary x86 software? Is it anywhere near as fast as Rosetta and is it as compatible? If I were to use 100% ARM software can I play any modern video games at all?
Oh, you were still talking about emulating an x86 binary? That's kind of a weird comparison because if you're running Linux and want to run x86 software you can just do it on x86. No corporation is forcing you off of the game's native architecture.
Yes, I’m talking real life use, where there is pre-existing software like video games that I own. Apple accommodated their customers properly by developing ARM SoC that is specifically designed to be performant at emulating x86-64 and compatibility layer with very good compatibility and performance. Not perfect by any means and there are no miracles but nobody comes close.
Nobody is forcing anyone off x86 and so it looks like Windows and Linux users will keep using it indefinitely while Apple users enjoy that sweet low power draw and instant wake from sleep that’s just not possible with x86.
They really did you a favor by breaking your existing, paid for software and then designing a chip to emulate another processor to fix the problem they made.
Anyway, enjoy your low power draw. I'll be over here running my whole Steam library on a handheld device that costs less than your RAM upgrade.
I’ve used Linux on desktop for 15 years and keep using it for servers. I guess you haven’t seen Linux break ABI yet. You’ll get there.