Windows games come to Macs with Apple Silicon, FX Steam Launcher allows you to start SteamOS on macOS

Who said Apple computers weren’t good for gaming? The apple giant has put a lot of effort into making its graphics compatible Metal with the most popular games. But the community has done its thing again, and has extended this compatibility to a broader catalog such as Steam. The new project FX Steam Launcher has allowed to execute SteamOS on Mac computers with Apple Silicon processorsopening up the possibility of playing Windows games.

FX Steam Launcher brings SteamOS to Macs with Apple Silicon

The project allows to execute Steam OSthe operating system that Valve includes in its products, on Apple computers with their own processors. For this the version has been used SteamOS ARM64 inherited from the latest glasses from the video game giant, the Steam Frame. This has allowed us to launch a complete Steam interface on Macs and access the catalog of games compatible with SteamOS.

If you are interested in trying this new project, FX Steam Launcher is now available on GitHub and is open source. A virtual machine is used to run SteamOS inside the Mac through Apple’s hypervisor.framework and libkrun. Something that we have already seen in DroidDeck that does the same, but on Android operating systems.

SteamOS on Mac supports controllers, audio, and GPU acceleration

FX Steam Launcher can work in full screen or in a window, and is also compatible with controls, audio and acceleration through the GPU. You will also be able to use SteamOS as a PC, as it is also compatible with the included KDE desktop. To install it, FX Steam Launcher is capable of downloading the SteamOS image from Valve’s servers and you can also update it as if it were installed on your Mac.

To make Steam games compatible, we have used Soon 11 for ARM64 and FEXthe tools necessary to translate Windows games to Linux and x86 instructions to ARM64. Graphic instructions are also converted to Apple Metal through its APIand it is also compatible with games DirectX 10, 11 and 12.

To install it you must have macOS 15 or higherand for the moment you will need a much newer version like macOS 26 for games with DirectX 12although those that require Shader Model 6.6 are not supported at the moment.

The configuration allows you to allocate CPU and memory, as well as resource monitoring. It is also compatible with the keyboard and mouseas well as gamepads including those from Microsoft and Sony.

More than 200 FPS in Left 4 Dead 2 with a MacBook Pro M4 Max

The tests have managed to raise the numbers of FPS over 200 in some games like Left 4 Dead 2playing at 1080p on high settings. For this, a MacBook Pro with Apple M4 Max processor of 14 CPU cores, 32 GPU cores and 36 GB of unified memory. Other titles have also reached 70 FPS, a more than acceptable rate, while Marvel vs Capcom: Infinite has been simply playable with some graphical errors.

A project that, with the help of the community, will surely soon allow more games to be run with acceptable FPS rates, in addition to maximizing compatibility with the latest requirements in games like Shader Model 6.6 and a level of features DirectX 12 12_1 which is also not currently supported. We will see in a few days what the community is capable of with the help of AI.