"Gnome vs KDE Plasma - Choosing the Best Desktop Environment for Gaming on Linux"
216In this video I discuss whether using Gnome or KDE Plasma makes any difference to gaming performance, and if not, what does?
Gnome has a reputation of been heavy and has the tendency to use more system resources, whereas KDE Plasma is seen as more lightweight using a minimum number of resources, but does this really make a different in modern systems?
In my experience, I have not seen any indication that using either Gnome or KDE Plasma makes any meaningful performance difference when playing games, if anything, KDE Plasma is marginal at best.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e2t24COrxi8
This was also the conclusion by Joe from Bero Tech when he carried out some benchmarks running several games launched from Gnome and KDE Plasma.
So, if the desktop environment does not make a difference to gaming performance, then what does?
In my experience, two things, the desktop compositor, and the CPU governor.
1. Desktop Compositors.
A desktop window compositor is used to provide animations and visual effects to windows but if this is enabled at the same time as a full screen application such as a game, it can negatively affect the performance in game.
Gnome uses a compositor and window manager called Mutter, which cannot be disabled, so instead it supports something called full screen unredirect, which means that a full screen application is simply excluded from compositing.
KDE Plasma on the other hand uses a compositor and window manager called Kwin, which unlike Mutter, can be disabled, and is designed to do so once it detects a full screen application has been launched.
https://store.kde.org/p/1502826/
In my experience, I have found that sometimes KWin will not disable the compositor, so I use a KWin script to ensure this happens.
2. CPU Governor.
The second factor that affects gaming performance is what CPU governor that you are using, which can be thought as a power scheme for a CPU that dictates the maximum and minimum frequencies that a CPU can run at.
There are several CPU governors to choose from, but the recommended one to use for gaming is performance.
https://github.com/FeralInteractive/gamemode#gamemode
You can install and use a tool called Feral Gamemode to change your CPU governor to performance on the fly when a game is launched.
https://github.com/vagnum08/cpupower-gui#cpupower-gui
Alternatively, if you want to permanently set a CPU to use the performance governor on boot, you can use a tool such as CPUPower-GUI.
In summary, the desktop environment does not really matter, but using the performance governor and disabling the compositor will give you the best performance.
#performance #linuxgaming #desktopenvironments