EDIT: I noticed your later post where you rephrase your argument to add the stipulation that the game has to be doing everything properly
While that’s true on a theoretical level the practical result is that most games DO have flaws that cause them to run sub optimally
Sure if we lived in a perfect world all games would do things as best as possible and therefore the native version would always win, but that’s not the case.
Also even if we lived in that perfect world the overhead of the translation layer is incredibly small nowadays and the advantage can be eaten up by the fact that windows is still unfortunately a very bloated OS
So yeah, theoretically native code will always be faster. But in practice? Not so much.
Feel free to ignore the rest of my response, I’m just leaving it just in case anyone else is interested
Actually it can
The reason is because some games can have poorly implemented techniques
Elden Ring played very poorly natively on PC when it released because whoever ported it from consoles didn’t bother to implement proper shader compilation
DXVK compiles shaders on its own and caused the game to run more smoothly through Proton than it did natively
For most games there’s a little bit of overhead, sure, but it’s so negligible that you would be hard pressed to noticed it, also Windows has so much junk running in the background even when Game Mode is disabled that it’s very possible to get better performance on Proton
Three gaming-focused Linux operating systems beat Windows 11 in gaming benchmarks
All three Linux distros managed to beat Windows 11 while using Valve's Proton compatibility layer.
I understand your skepticism, I was also convinced that there’s no way a solution as janky as running games through WINE would lead to equivalent performance, but these layers have advanced so much that they actually made it possible.
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