KDE Plasma, GNOME Shell, Xfce, LXQt & MATE Linux Gaming Benchmarks, Including X.Org/Wayland

Overall from these results, the performance was fairly close between the different desktop environments -- more so than some of the past Linux gaming desktop comparisons further in the past. The (X)Wayland performance on the current GNOME and KDE releases were also much closer than we have seen in some of our previous comparisons.

F1 2018 was used as a Steam Play / DXVK test. This game would hang when trying to run on the Wayland-based desktops. While the average frame-rates were similar, it was worth pointing out that KDE Plasma and MATE had higher peak frame times than the rest.

Metro Last Light Redux was slightly favoring the Xfce desktop.

There wasn't too much variation in the OpenArena results besides pointing out the XWayland performance on GNOME Shell for this game was slower than on the X.Org session.