Counter Strike 2 on Mac? Valve finally dispels doubts about gaming on macOS

More than a decade ago, the fourth installment in the Counter-Strike series called Global Offensive was released. For many years, the title has enjoyed great popularity, and over time, CS:GO has gained cult status. Valve announced continued production in March of this year, and beta testing has been underway since then. At the end of September, the game became available to everyone. Well, almost, because Mac owners won’t get to have that much fun. Valve suggests this in a post on the Steam tab.

No more illusions about playing Counter-Strike 2 on Mac platforms. Valve has made it simple: only Windows and Linux owners will be able to play. Of course, only in the 64-bit version.

Counter-Strike 2 will be offered with NVIDIA Reflex support, and owners of older GeForce cards will benefit the most.

Valve is the development studio responsible for the FPS game’s debut at the end of September. Counter-Strike 2 has announced that it will no longer support the new CS on Mac. Although the game has been visually enhanced using the Source 2 engine, the developer claims that the platform simply does not have enough players, making it unnecessary to invest time and resources in creating a CS2 version specifically for Apple devices. In total, macOS users were to make up just 1% of all active CS:GO players.

Counter-Strike 2 game with file leaks. The beta is available for download and testing without Valve’s invitation

One of the reasons why macOS does not support the aforementioned platform is the lack of support for the Vulkan graphics API, the successor to OpenGL, and as if that was not enough, support for older hardware, including DX9 and other 32-bit operating systems has also been abandoned. Ultimately, this means that Counter-Strike 2 only runs on 64-bit Windows and Linux systems. This is very surprising, because CS:GO players on Mac initially received a 26GB update, which was supposed to convert the game to CS 2. However, after this update, production stopped working. Today we know that macOS owners will have to stick with the first version of CS.

Source: Valve