Nearly one in five Mac gamers on Steam are using systems powered by Apple's M4 chip, according to actual user data provided by Valve.
The M4 chip debuted in the iPad Pro back in May 2024, before eventually expanding to nearly the entire Mac lineup. Though it has since been replaced by the M5 chip in the 14-inch MacBook Pro, the M4 remains the most popular Apple Silicon chip among Steam gamers.
According to Steam's monthly hardware and software survey, 19.60% of Macs running Steam in December 2025 were powered by Apple's M4 system-on-chip. The second most popular chip is the M1 chip from 2020, which accounted for 18.06% of Macs used by Steam gamers.
This is followed by the M2 and M3 chips at 13.08% and 7.31%, respectively. The M2 remains more popular than the M3 chip, despite the latter offering support for hardware-accelerated ray tracing, among other features.
Max versions are less popular than core models. Ultra variants in the Mac Studio and Mac Pro don't make an appearance on the chart.
The new and improved M5 chip, meanwhile, was used by just over 1% of Mac gamers with Steam. Announced in October 2025, the M5 delivers up to 45% faster graphics compared to the M4 and 2.5x faster than the M1. Even so, the M5 chip is only available in the 14-inch MacBook Pro, which explains its position in the Steam survey.
In contrast, the M4 chip is available across a wide variety of Macs, including the 24-inch iMac, Mac mini, MacBook Air and MacBook Pro, with various RAM and storage configurations. Steam's December 2025 survey revealed that Mac gamers most commonly used machines with 16GB of RAM, with more than a quarter of users running macOS Tahoe.
While Apple's efforts to popularize the Mac as a gaming platform have proven largely unsuccessful, those who do game on the Mac have found the M4 chip a worthwhile upgrade. Once the M5 chip becomes available across the Mac lineup, we'll obviously see the results reflected in future Steam surveys.
It remains to be seen exactly how popular the M5 chip will prove with gamers, though. Steam gamers may stick to their M4-based machines for a while, meaning we could see results similar to how the M2 and M3 chips were listed in the December 2025 survey.
