For me, it’s Shared GPU memory.
I just use a single Bottle’s bottle to install a bunch of off-Steam games. Contains many older windows dependencies; you have to install them yourself but they are found within the bottle’s settings.
I remember trying to get Sims 3 working for my partner, it had all sorts of missing textures, kept crashing and had poor performance. Turns out you need a 4gb patch?? made from the community? Decided to toss it in my bottle and it works flawlessly. Have not tried dos games but may be worth a shot.