Did Apple Lie To Mac Gamers?

Steve Jobs keynote this past Monday wasn’t groundbreaking, but there was a fair amount of good info brought up, including a new deal with Electronic Arts. Not only are NFS: Carbon, Command and Conquer 3 and Battlefield 2142 coming to the Mac, but a few sport titles later this year.

But as Extreme Tech found out, there was a little tidbit kept from the audience. None of the mentioned games would have a native OS X client, instead, they will be running through Transgaming’s Cider platform. This will result in less than ideal performance and potential problems, since that method is still not entirely reliable. Nothing stops regular users from using Cider themselves and running these games, so this was technically nothing more than a PR stunt. It could be that EA wants to see how well these versions will sell, before fully delving into the world that is Mac.

So, in a nutshell, the games that use Cider will not be running natively in Mac OS X. Why is this significant? Well there may be potential performance hits compared to running the same game under Windows (which is obviously now possible on a Mac given Boot Camp). How big a potential performance hit might we be looking at? There’s no way to know at this point.

Source: Extreme Tech