Always did on my hardware at least. When I was using Windows, my old laptop started lagging very much and it was becoming unbearable. I could not get a new one immediately. I got to know about Linux one day and installed it to try it out because there was not really anything else I could try.
I could not believe myself how buttery smooth my laptop became after that. 95% of the games that I used to play on Windows run with more performance on Linux.