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What added overhead?

There's no emulation, just alternative implementation (kernel, drivers, userspace, including Windows APIs with Wine). I don't play and I haven't looked at the results but it does not surprise me that an alternative implementation can perform better.

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Don't those alternative implementation add a few extra layers of abstraction that must affect performance?

IIUC no, they don't add layers, they replace them. For instance, the Windows APIs are implemented in Windows in DLLs that Wine reimplements.

Caveat for dxvk, as mentioned by iforgotpassword, there's indeed a translation layer there.

Not an expert on the topic.

Dxvk/vkd3d, although as seen with arc newer cards might actually implement older dx Standards in such a crappy way that software translation to Vulkan is still faster.

Didn't Intel switch to using d9vk on their Arc GPUs because it was faster and less work than fixing DX9 directly?

Yes, and dxvk was actually available for windows before that and people figuring out that even on AMD and Nvidia you can get notable performance boosts in certain games. Intel just did the sane thing of giving up completely since their implementation was never there in the first place, and from what I heard even the hardware not designed with how those older APIs work, which might give them an advantage over the other two.

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