Ubuntu 16.10 Desktop Gaming Benchmarks: Unity, GNOME, Xfce, LXDE, KDE, Openbox, MATE
With getting things started by the very basic OpenArena test, MATE and KDE Plasma were noticeably behind the five other tested desktop environments. LXDE came in front but with only a one FPS advantage over Openbox.
With Tesseract, MATE and Xfce were noticeably slower than the others that performed around the same speed.
When Unigine Valley is completely stressing the GPU, there isn't much difference in the frame-rate at all.