[OmegaZero_Alpha]

Macs can't play games for shit.

Their software makes them inherently weaker than PCs, and programs actually run better on macs when you install windows 7 anyway, and then the fact that their drivers are all written for professional use compounds this problem.

I would be lucky to get 20FPS in tf2 on similar hardware on a Macintosh platform.

My 2-year-old iMac gets ~50fps on high settings 1920x1200 when I boot to XP. Just updated my Parallels VM and it gets ~30-40fps at the same res with medium settings. One is left to assume that if Valve either ports the game or uses Cider as a wrapper it won't hit performance nearly as much as you're suggesting. It's true, because programmers are lazy, it won't get the same FPS rates as Windows but it's not going to be nearly as bad as you're making it out to be.

I would like to first state that running something in a virtual machine is in no way emulating a port. All of the driver issues in macs are eliminated by running it in a virtual machine because of the fact that you are using windows drivers at that point, and you are effectively using DirectX.

Macintosh HAS no directX. Microsoft will never allow that to happen. The only option for them is to use OpenGL, which sucks shit for high-end (post-2006) gaming at this point in time.

Second, Cider wouldn't solve the problems for non-intel macs, which is REALLY the only issue here. Why would they waste all of this effort to port something just to save people the five to ten minutes rebooting into windows?

Cider also can't handle middleware. So I hope you can enjoy playing Half Life 2 without physics.