What about the games that have no entry in the WINE database? Are they just untested or do they not work at all?

It is? I've personally seen better performance with Wine + Linux than with Windows.

Now, this isn't to say that Wine is totally up to par with Windows in terms of compatibility, but performance hasn't been a significant issue for quite some time.

I searched for a few games I'm playing now and have played recently and out of 10 there were 4 that had no entry on the WINE database.

This might be enough of a barrier to stop me using it right now.

That happens, particularly on really new (or really obscure) software. Really, though, that ought to be an encouragement; sure, you're left in the dark, but it means that those games could use some test coverage. Your contributions to the AppDB could help quite a few others.

Parent's post has so many qualifiers, it says nothing at all.

I do not see a performance penalty at all with WINE. Most games that work play at speeds matching or better than windows. WoW is usually a big example of that, as are emulators.

WoW and emulators are both fairly trivial for a modern system to run well. There is definitely a significant performance hit if you are running something in WINE that nearly maxes your performance in windows

someone's never used Higan before. I've made Stunt Race FX and Yoshi's Island peg a Core i7. Running Tekken 4 on MAME is just as intensive.

Running either in wine is a fine benchmark on performance.