Hi, I wanted to buy a mac mini M4 for some gaming and web surfing. I specifically like to game on the gaming client STEAM. i like street fighter 6. i read something about boot camp assistant not working with the M chips in mac mini. what are some ways i can play ALL of my steam games on MAC mini M4?
[Re-Titled by Moderator]
Original Title: Gaming with steam on a mac mini M4
Don't buy the M-series Mac for gaming....especially Steam gaming. AFAIK, all Steam games & even the Steam client are Intel apps. Apple has already announced they will be retiring Rosetta 2 in a few years, so even if a game works today, it will likely cease to work in a few years. Plus many games for the Intel Macs do not run very well on an M-series Macs.
I just looked an Valve has finally released a Beta test version of the Steam client app for an M-series Mac (native app so Rosetta 2 is not needed to run the Steam client beta version). Unfortunately this is only the Steam app, not any of the Steam games. I would not expect any existing Steam games to natively support an M-series Mac even in the future....after all it took five years to have an M-series native beta version of the Steam client.
https://9to5mac.com/2025/06/12/steam-finally-goes-native-on-apple-silicon-heres-how-to-try-it/
Even if a Steam game "runs" on an M-series Mac with Rosetta 2, many times the performance of the game will not be great. I've seen reports of people using the paid third party app CrossOverMac to play games for an Intel Mac and the results were mixed depending on the game since a special graphical library was needed & this special graphical library does not allow for great performance. After all there are multiple layers of translation going on here for the CPU & GPU.
One thing I've learned over the years when it comes to game developers & publishers......they rarely update the game to work on newer systems even when the CPU architecture does not change. I would expect even fewer existing games for the Intel Macs to be ported to the M-series Mac.
When Steam releases M-series Mac compatible games, then things will be different.
If you purchase an M-series Mac for other things and it happens to work with a particular game, then great! But don't buy the M-series Mac expecting a good gaming experience or you will be disappointed.
Macs have never been a gaming system. Macs have always been a sub par gaming experience especially for online games. There may be a few exceptions of course, but that is the general experience.
arsalan0100 wrote:
read something about boot camp assistant not working with the M chips in mac mini.
Apple Silicon processors use a different type of machine language than Intel/AMD processors do.
If you want to run Windows on an Apple Silicon Mac, you need to run Windows 11 for ARM inside a virtual machine. Neither Apple nor Microsoft support running Windows in dual-boot fashion on an Apple Silicon Mac. And you can't run "regular" Intel versions of Windows inside of a virtual machine as they are written in the wrong type of machine language. To an Apple Silicon processor, Intel machine code looks like nonsense, garbage code.
Windows 11 for ARM can run some Windows/Intel applications in emulation. But now you are running your Wintel games with the overhead both of Microsoft's Intel emulator, and of the virtual machine environment.
Thank you for the detailed explanation. ☺️
Is Boot Camp necessary for gaming with Steam on Mac mini M4?
