Comment by toast0

It seemed to me that the issue with the games was that they did split locks at all, and when Linux detected that and descheduled the process, performance was trash. I didn't think they were doing frequent split locks that resulted in bad performance by itself.

You don't need to be a careful shopper for this; just turn off detection while you're playing these games, or tune the punishment algorithm, or patch the game. Just because the developer won't doesn't mean you can't; there's plenty of 3rd party binary patches for games.