This means that, even though 1/3rd of my steam library has mac versions, half of these games don't actually run well.
(Disclaimer: since switching to mac, I typically game only on PS4 nowadays, which I guess probably doesn't have better hardware, but at least has well optimised games and lots of awesome exclusives)
Interesting fact: my in-game ping is usually 1 or 0, because its in the same data centre as the dedicated servers, heh. Removes another possible bit of latency, which is nice!
I thought Cider's performance and feature set had fallen dramatically behind Wine years ago, in part because some parts of their stack do rendering in software instead of hardware (the D3D to OpenGL translation is not the slow step in the process).
I haven't tried the new version but I'm okay with getting these versions that are degraded instead of not having a game. Which makes me wonder how they're doing this nearly flawlessly on consoles. There has to be some performance hit due to making the game work with the various translation layers but in reality I hardly notice them. Would be nice if they could get it that performant with Mac.
As for how it's able to work on consoles, presumably the console versions are proper ports that actually use the native APIs. The game was designed with the PlayStation 3 specifically in mind, after all.
Cider has both been a great boon to Mac gaming — it makes it cheap and quick to port Windows-only titles to the Mac without having to make them internally cross-platform — and also a great detriment: its Windows translation layer imposes a performance penalty and prevents true native feel, and crucially, many such games are using Cider's slow Direct3D-to-OpenGL translator, which is not only slower than real Direct3D (thus why such games will always run better under Windows in Boot Camp on the same hardware), and limits you to the Direct3D 9 featureset, but it is also translating to a graphics API Apple basically don't care about now (OpenGL).
The good news is that more and more games are using commodity engines, and those engines usually have proper native macOS support, and ideally Metal support. Nonetheless, Cider ports are very much a thing that must still be contended with.
For a recent high-profile case of Cider causing trouble, Square Enix went the cheap route when they ported their MMORPG, Final Fantasy XIV: A Realm Reborn, to the Mac, and used Cider. The result was infamously bad and they had to pull it from the shelves. They did of course fix it up and re-release it, but even then, the resulting port is slower than and graphically inferior to simply running the game under Windows, because it's stuck with fake Direct3D 9. On Windows you get to choose between Direct3D 9 and Direct3D 11.