Comment by krige
Things that go through the proper channels are usually compatible. Crysis was never the most stable of games and IIRC it used 3DNow, which is deprecated - but not by Windows.
As a counter-anecdata, last week I ran Galapagos: Mendel's Escape with zero compat patches or settings, that's a 1997 3D game just working.
> Things that go through the proper channels are usually compatible.
But that's a pretty low bar - previously Windows went to great lengths to preserve backwards compatibility even for programs that are out of spec.
If you just care about keeping things working if they were done "correctly" then the average Linux desktop can do that too - both for native Linux programs (glibc and a small list of other base system libraries have strong backwards compatibility) as well as for Windows programs via Wine.