The gaming performance issues you were facing might be related to Vulkan support for the card, if it works better on Windows, as apparently Kepler cards don’t have great support for Vulkan: bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=273935
I see Vulkan 1.2 is actually the latest version of Vulkan that supported Kepler architecture GPUs like the GT 730, which stopped receiving non-security updates after October 2021: …custhelp.com/…/support-plan-for-kepler-series-ge…
On Windows, games probably used OpenGL. If you were playing games with Proton, it prefers DXVK because it offers better compatibility and performance than wined3d’s OpenGL translation layer. DXVK 2.0 and onwards have used Vulkan 1.3, which requires a GPU newer than yours. I don’t know whether Steam (and Proton 8+) falls back to using DXVK 1.10 or falls back to OpenGL/wined3d.
Either way, that means you haven’t been getting the latest performance improvement updates in DXVK since late 2022. So force-enabling wined3d’s OpenGL translation layer with PROTON_USE_WINED3Dmight help, if it’s not doing that already? I don’t know if OpenGL would actually perform better, so this is kind of a long shot…
If you were playing Native GNU/Linux games, it might be different.
I second the openSUSE recommendation. My brief experience with it was really nice.
Edit: Ah, I see you’ve quit gaming, lol. Well, either way, if you use Wine with DXVK, maybe the above will help.