The age where players can ignore gaming on Mac may be coming to an end. Third-party devs using open-source software are providing what Apple can’t—or won’t—offer gamers: access to all their games from their regular PC launcher. With new emulators, we’re now seeing the first inklings of a future where your Steam library doesn’t have to be locked down to any one operating system or chipset.
GameSir, a company mostly known for its controllers and gaming peripherals, promised the moon when it claimed that it was bringing its GameHub app to Mac platforms. In an image posted to X, the company showed off several Mac products like a Mac Studio and Mac mini alongside games like Black Myth: Wukong and God of War: Ragnarok. GameSir somehow forgot that Baldur’s Gate III already has a native Mac version available, but let’s just move on.
Your Mac is now a gaming PC.
Introducing GameHub for Mac. Unlock your entire Steam library. 💽
Coming soon.#GameSir #GameHub #Steam #Macgaming pic.twitter.com/oVXrqXJRP1
— GameSir (@mygamesir) February 15, 2026
GameSir hasn’t shared more details beyond that, though you can already see for yourself how GameHub performs on Android platforms. On Monday, YouTuber ETA Prime managed to get Cyberpunk 2077 playing through emulation on a Redmagic 11 Pro phone, which uses a novel liquid cooling apparatus to eat at the massive amount of heat blasting from the Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 chip housed inside. The software is essentially emulating mainstay PC microarchitecture—namely x86—in a software environment. That does create some performance loss, though ETA Prime pushed the game up to around 30 fps at 720p resolution on low graphics settings. He could squeak out a few more frames with the use of FSR and frame generation as well.
The Redmagic 11 Pro is a gamer phone stacked with 16GB of RAM and overclocking capabilities, but it’s still just a phone. What would happen when we bring the same capabilities to the more powerful Mac products? Cyberpunk 2077 already performs well enough on a base 14-inch MacBook Pro with M5 chip at high settings and 1200p. If these emulators perform well enough on Apple’s current and upcoming slate of Mac products, Mac gaming could have the renaissance Apple could never give it by itself.
You should care about Fex for more than just the Steam Frame
Fex allows ARM-based platforms, like a Qualcomm Snapdragon X-based PC, to run 3D games like Yooka-Laylee. © C8C3; screenshot by GizmodoGameHub allows for multiple instances of open-source emulation, including Fex, which was developed with the financial backing of Valve to make it possible to run Steam games on hardware like the upcoming Steam Frame. Naturally, Valve—being the largest PC games distributor in the world (with near-monopoly power over PC gaming)—wants to push Steam on as many platforms as possible.
If there’s a place in Apple’s walled garden for PC gaming, it will have to come from third-party developers scaling the Mac’s parapets with ropes and ladders. Fex, the x86 emulator, was designed by a small army of independent developers, and the entire concept behind the near-seven-year project was to eliminate the nature of gaming hardware exclusivity. That’s good news for Valve. If you can run all your Steam games on any platform, Valve can expand its stranglehold on PC gaming even further.
Fex developer Tony Wasserka displayed what programs are already using or planning to make use of Fex. © C9C3; screenshot by GizmodoDuring the annual 38C3 hacker conference last December in Hamburg, Germany, Fex-emu developer Tony Wasserka showed the assembled crowd how the emulator can recompile x86 code into ARM64 code. You can’t simply go from x86 instructions straight to those on ARM without increasing the code complexity. Things get even more complicated due to the need for file system and crash report redirections as well as GPU driver translations. Wasserka said that Fex’s secret sauce is its code caching and library forwarding capabilities. Suffice it to say, these capabilities are specialty codes that help bridge the Vulkan 3D graphics libraries between x86 and ARM.
Wasserka pointed to software like Crossover x86-to-Mac software translation and Asahi Linux—an attempt to make Linux work on Apple’s Mac products—which he said are already using Fex. The x86 emulator was made with gaming in mind with the promise of faster loading times and improved performance compared to other emulation layers. Apple and Microsoft already have their own versions of an x86 translation. Windows, in particular, recently updated its Prism emulator to add AVX and AVX2 (Advanced Vector Extensions) that actually enable gaming. Fex, on the other hand, is open source and isn’t confined to any one platform or use case.
Macs may still be limited by memory
There are only so many native AAA games available on Mac. © Kyle Barr / GizmodoMacBooks are notoriously some of the most expensive and locked-down devices in modern computing. If you want an M4 MacBook Air with more GPU cores and 1TB of storage, you need to spend at least $1,400. There’s no way to upgrade RAM or the SSD yourself (to be frank, soldered RAM is a growing trend among recent PCs as well). AAA games today demand so much storage space that the regular Mac user with the base 512GB SSD in some models will find themselves limited.
M-series silicon already sports the kind of GPU performance you need for gaming. The problem has long been developer support. Apple can try to drag publishers like CD Projekt Red, Capcom, and Ubisoft over to Mac, but it’s simply not enough for the notoriously prickly PC gaming crowd. With an easy-to-use emulator that doesn’t require users to learn to use any extra software, we may finally see Mac gaming come into its own.
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