Recent benchmarks by Phoronix reveal a close contest between GNOME and KDE for Linux gaming performance. In tests conducted on CachyOS with an NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5090 GPU and default configurations, GNOME 50.3 marginally outperformed KDE Plasma 6.7.2.

Both GNOME and KDE utilized the Wayland display protocol, while Xfce 4.2.0 ran on X11, placing it significantly behind, particularly in Vulkan rendering. GNOME showed leads of 7% and 18% over KDE and Xfce respectively in Gravity Mark, and an impressive 86% lead over Xfce in 3DMark Wild Life Extreme.

In actual game benchmarks like Cyberpunk 2077 and Hitman 3, the differences were negligible, with KDE sometimes edging out GNOME. However, in Batman Arkham Knight, GNOME maintained a lead. These results are subject to change with future updates, especially as Xfce adopts Wayland.