Xfce, Mate, and LXDE Gaming Performance Benchmarks

**brian62** · June 3rd, 2015

I did a benchmark comparison between Xfce, Mate, and LXDE with Openbox to see which desktop environment yields the best GPU and game performance. Each of the desktop environments were installed via the default Ubuntu software repositories and benchmarked using GpuTest, MadShaders, Unigine Valley, and War Thunder.

I created a spreadsheet of my findings here - https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets...D9aJn5GSD42Ew/

I also made a video of the benchmarks here - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nNGG_dUBBU0

**oldrocker99** · June 6th, 2015

Very interesting. I was gratified to see my desktop of choice, MATE, as having the lowest RAM usage.

**Dragonbite** · June 16th, 2015

Kinda bummed that Plasma 5 shows such a jump over the others (Unity and Gnome). I've been using it for a little while now and I find it responsive and working great on my laptop despite being older.

Thanks for taking the time to put this information together. I'm always taking a look at the choices (especially with my Netbook which Mate works wonderfully on). I always suspected Lxde wasn't as light as it could have been and the chart matches my experiences.

**mastablasta** · June 17th, 2015

why is there such high ram usage at idle?

**R33D3M33R** · June 18th, 2015

I don't think high RAM usage is such a big deal: http://www.linuxatemyram.com/

**Dragonbite** · June 18th, 2015

Isn't part of the RAM usage like "pre-loading" bits and pieces so when they are called the response is faster, but if that RAM is needed elsewhere it is made available? I thought I read more systems are starting to do this (if they aren't already).

**Ordev** · October 11th, 2015

Hi. Just stopped by to confirm that XFCE has issues when it comes to gaming. I've been using XFCE since 2008 and i think that it is very nice customizable desktop environment. For the last two years i've been trying to run linux games in steam without rebooting to windows. The games perform acceptable, but not great (scrolling in Dota2 isn't smooth like it is on windows, camera movement in Cities skylines is also sluggish).What a surprise it was when i ran those games in Gnome, KDE and LXDE! With all these DE games run smooth like in windows. I hope XFCE devs are aware of this issue since there are entire linux distributions use XFCE by default.