no light games when using Proton requires it, and only a very rare heavy game does.
It might be that in CPU heavy games under CPU starvation the game's + Wine audio threads do not keep up. What does 'ulimit -e' say? If it is not negative It might be that allowing thread priority increase for user (by editing /etc/security/limits.conf) can work better. if you run with WINEDEBUG=+server, do you see ("wine: RLIMIT_NICE is \<= 20, unable to use setpriority safely\\n") messages? If yes, Wine can't alter priorities due to limits. While unrelated here, I went ahead and pushed the updated patch version to the current Proton Experimental bleeding-edge branch (see https://github.com/ValveSoftware/Proton/wiki/Proton-Versions#proton-bleeding...), if you want to try with Proton you can use that version (experimental-bleeding-edge-11.0-359342-20260512-pd2f45d-w4531de-d6e9b50-v4ed1fe) -- https://gitlab.winehq.org/wine/wine/-/merge_requests/10792#note_139512