I'm a lightweight gamer, but i've never had any trouble with drawing gaming windows on i3... I mostly play old stuff or FOSS versions of old stuff e.g ioquake based games, openra, stuff like that.

However i've also tried out steam occasionally and not had any issues.

What kind of games have you had issues with?

Note i'm using X11 still and no compositor, you mention Sway, maybe these are Wayland specific issues?

[edit]

> I tried i3 with programs that expected to be able to arbitrarily draw windows it didn't work super great

Ahh, if you mean the game needs to draw multiple windows, yeah I've noticed programs that draw lots of floating windows can get into a mess, but I've not really used many of them often. I'm not sure why this is, it's not like they are using the i3wm default floating dimensions or anything.

For games windows that start floating I usually just full screen them or drop them down into tiling mode. But then i've never played a multi window game.

> What kind of games have you had issues with?

Mostly Windows games through Proton/Wine expecting to be able to take full control of the screen, and then having a panic attack when not allowed to.

As far as programs wanting to draw many floating windows, that's happened with Krita/Inkscape more than games, games just... didn't play nice. I'd get crashes when changing workspaces, when launching a game, so on. That was on i3 itself as well, I didn't switch to sway until after I stopped trying to enforce tiling on everything I do (just most things :P )