That's completely different to my own experience. In my experience, there tend to be minor issues with graphically intensive games but they mostly work fine with good performance. For example, I'm playing Alien Isolation on a Lenovo Ideapad laptop, with most settings at max, and I'm impressed by how well it runs.

There are some problems and glitches unrelated to the games, in my experience (like how newer nvidia GPUs have screen tearing on Ubuntu -- unrelated to vsync, by the way -- and there's pretty much nothing you can do about it for the time being)