It’s going to depend. If it’s a really old game it’s unlikely to matter. Anything heavy on CPU and particularly single core performance may struggle through a translation layer. A good translation layer on a good chip will probably lead to roughly similar performance in many cases, and most games seem to be GPU limited, so it’s possible it will just work out most of the time. It could always be the case that a critical section of the code somewhere ends up not translating well, leading to poor performance. It would not be terribly surprising for an important loop to end up two or four times slower than it should be, which could cause hiccups.
Does a performance hit matter for older games (I’m assuming they’re already 60+ if not a multiple)
It’s going to depend. If it’s a really old game it’s unlikely to matter. Anything heavy on CPU and particularly single core performance may struggle through a translation layer. A good translation layer on a good chip will probably lead to roughly similar performance in many cases, and most games seem to be GPU limited, so it’s possible it will just work out most of the time. It could always be the case that a critical section of the code somewhere ends up not translating well, leading to poor performance. It would not be terribly surprising for an important loop to end up two or four times slower than it should be, which could cause hiccups.