Games support Linux either natively or through Steam that leverages Wine (Wine is no emulator), which just supplies the necessary libraries to build the required software environment. There can be a performance impact and some compatibility issues, but you don't have to expect this to be the case. There are even some cases where users report improved performance.
...well, okay, so that depends on your definition of “emulator”, but compared to a more traditional emulator like Dolphin or even Rosetta, there’s very little performance impact from Wine in most cases.
Honestly, it depends on the game. Hence I suggest checking ProtonDB[0] for the games you are planning to play. Most of the reports also have details about CPU, GPU, GPU driver etc.
Anecdotally, I remember playing Team Fortress 2's native port on Intel i7-2630qm CPU on my laptop back in 2012-2013 at 1366*768 resolution with no major performance difference. (setting up bumblebee was not an easy task for me back then.)
The article or the ProtonDB website says that 80% of the top 100 games from Steam are at least Gold++. For his group Gold++ consists of 51% Games with Gold+, meaning that the run as good as on windows and additional 29% that run native on the platform. So your performance should be as good as on Windows.
IIRC quite some games did run faster on WINE (if running at all) than an Windows. I would be interesting to know if the same is true for Proton.
It took me two reads and some additional thinking before I was able to unravel what is shown here. So I try to summarize what is displayed in this chart.
Looking at the Top 100: Here we have Unrated:0 Borked:10% Bronze+:61% Silver+:58% Gold+:51% Platinum:6% Native:29%
Some, but not all of these categories include the ones below. (Not even the rating definition will explain this) So every game that is considered Platinum is additionally counted as Gold+, Silver+, Bronce+, but not as Borked, Unrated or Native. So you have 51% of games that are Gold+ and additionally 29% with Native support, summing up to 80% Gold++.
I feel they guys at /r/dataisbeautifull might be able to create a better visualization of this.
I have as much and I can't think of more than 2 that got removed in the 12 years I got my Steam account. Games no longer available for purchase (but still playable) is something the publisher controls. Bit weird blaming Steam for a publisher pulling their game from the store.
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[ 3.8 ms ] story [ 75.3 ms ] threadWine Is Not an Emulator. ;)
...well, okay, so that depends on your definition of “emulator”, but compared to a more traditional emulator like Dolphin or even Rosetta, there’s very little performance impact from Wine in most cases.
Metal calls are pretty much kept as-is, whereas Wine has to translate DirectX operations to OpenGL or Vulkan, like VirtualBox or Parallels.
But it's true that when it comes to raw CPU power, Wine very likely provides the best performance.
Anecdotally, I remember playing Team Fortress 2's native port on Intel i7-2630qm CPU on my laptop back in 2012-2013 at 1366*768 resolution with no major performance difference. (setting up bumblebee was not an easy task for me back then.)
[0] https://www.protondb.com/
IIRC quite some games did run faster on WINE (if running at all) than an Windows. I would be interesting to know if the same is true for Proton.
Looking at the Top 100: Here we have Unrated:0 Borked:10% Bronze+:61% Silver+:58% Gold+:51% Platinum:6% Native:29%
Some, but not all of these categories include the ones below. (Not even the rating definition will explain this) So every game that is considered Platinum is additionally counted as Gold+, Silver+, Bronce+, but not as Borked, Unrated or Native. So you have 51% of games that are Gold+ and additionally 29% with Native support, summing up to 80% Gold++.
I feel they guys at /r/dataisbeautifull might be able to create a better visualization of this.
What do you mean?
Until someone finds a way to get anti-cheat systems to work in Linux, I won't be switching to Linux as my main OS.