I have Dell Latitude e7250 laptop with Intel HD 5500 CPU integrated GPU. I’ve noticed that my GPU performance is significantly higher on GNOME than on XFCE, MATE and KDE.
On GNOME I have about 150 fps on Extreme Tux Racer whereas on other desktop environments I have merely about 100-110 fps.
I’ve noticed also lower CPU usage on Youtube in Firefox and Chrome when I use GNOME environment.
I’ve checkec it on different Linux Distributions: Ubuntu, Linux Mint, Manjaro Linux. It is not related to Wayland. When I run GNOME with Xorg, I also see significant graphics performance advantage of GNOME.
The Intel GPU driver for the GNOME edition is the exact same ones as used in all other editions, because it is an in-kernel driver. So if there is indeed a difference in graphical performance, then that can only be due to the fact that the GNOME edition uses Wayland by default.
And that said…
You do know that the human eye can only discern 30 frames per second, right? Anything above that and the human eye cannot detect it anymore. Therefore, whether you’re getting 150 fps or whether you’re getting 110 fps is academic ─ it’s just a number.
