By "performance" it assumed you mean speed of retrieval of data from the tables compared to retrieval from the sheets.
As far as I know, there are no concrete metrics to help with this. (It's a matter of someone performing the analysis and capturing the results...a very time consuming endeavor). Sync times are the most important measure in our AppSheet apps. It is very hard to gauge Sync times between a db and Google sheets by simply "watching" over a number of Sync requests. There are so many variables that affect the Sync - network/internet hop speeds as well as processing congestion within the AppSheet servers.
I have worked worked in app development for over 2 decades with a lot of experience in SQL data design implementations as well as app data migrations from one db to another. Here is my general impression...
Databases, being a more powerful tool, have a lot more processing overhead than sheets do. This means, for smaller sets of data, a Google sheet seems to outperform a database. How small? There are many factors that contribute to this.
However, it has been my experience that once your data tables get to the 8,000 to 10,000 rows (for average tables of 20 - 30 columns), you will see a marked improvement in the AppSheet sync times if you were to convert to a database. BUT, consider that having a database connection comes at premium. Not only are the AppSheet licenses more expensive with the database support but the cost to setup and use a database itself has an expense.
There are measures you can take within an AppSheet app connected to sheets to have strong acceptable performance for data tables that grow well into the tens of thousands of rows. By then, hopefully, the app can financially support a move to a database.
Of course, if you have the budget for a database up front...Go for it! You will not regret it!
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