It was only a few days ago that we broke the news about Valve making available a new Steam Client Beta with native Apple Silicon support for testing, a move that breaks the multi-year streak of using a clunky web UI for its macOS app, and today, we’re excited to share that a very popular benchmark tool available from Steam is now compatible with macOS.
3Dmark, which crafted a name for itself over the years as a reliable and popular benchmark tool for Windows machines, became available for macOS on Monday. The application can be had from various download sources, including Steam, Epic Games, and UL Solutions.
We’ve already downloaded the 3Dmark application on our Mac, and what we’ve found is that there are four different benchmark tests available for users to try, including Solar Bay, Steel Nomad, Steel Nomad Lite, and Wild Life Extreme.
It’s worth noting that these benchmark tests can bench the GPU of your Mac using Apple’s own Metal graphics API, after which the benchmark score can be used to compare to other platforms such as those running Windows, Android, or even iOS/iPadOS.
If you already own the Windows version of 3Dmark as I did, then you can download the macOS version free of any additional cost. Otherwise, new customers will need to pay $34.99 to acquire it. If you’re a Mac user and you’re buying the application for the first time, then you’ll also be able to use it on any Windows PCs that you might own or buy in the future.
We’re particularly excited about this launch, as it gives Mac users a way to compare the performance of their machines to other platforms in a way that was previously not possible with 3Dmark.