Hey, guys!
Not long ago I was using Manjaro 21 Xfce version and Steam/Proton 7 with a few games… among them Medieval Dynasty, which by the way I couldn’t play decently on PopOS due to very low FPS, but in Manjaro worked like a charm right off the bat! Yesterday, I installed Manjaro 21 GNOME edition, BUT… the game mentioned above is not working like it was on the Xfce edition!!! In both cases I was using gamemoderun %command% in the Steam game options. I have an Nvidia Geforce GTX 1050.
Does anybody know why I’m having these differences on performance even though when I’m using the same operating system and the same game tweaks?
Thanks in advance!
Alex.
The difference may be the resources the different desktops use. Xfce is one of the lighter desktops. Gnome on the other had uses a lot more, its one of the heaviest users of resources. The more resources a desktop uses, fewer exist to run games and applications. This can cause things to run slower.
Hey, Jim!
That could be a possibility. Is there too much difference between them? I suppose PopOS! uses a lot of resources too since it comes with GNOME as well. Maybe I should install Xfce again and check how the game runs once more.
-Alex.
Hello @alro7779 
Yes, Gnome need a bit more resources than XFCE. And yeah it is a 3D Desktop. A bit less RAM can result in lower frame rates.
Depending on your system I would go even lower… Install i3, it takes about 500MB and rest can be taken by steam and games.
Gnome uses about 200mb more ram than Xfce. Thats a lot depending on how much you have .
If you want a low resource desktop, Xfce is ok. If you want a standard desktop with low resouce usage LXQt qould be my choice. Manjaro doesnt have an install media for it, but I do make a manjaro LXQt spin. It can be found in this section of the forum if you want to try it.
Gnome uses about 1GB more RAM then XFCE, So I’d say you should have 16GB or more RAM and SWAP.
Gnome/KDE uses OpenGL to speed up desktop, Etc, Etc, which is also using more Video RAM, then XFCE.
I have never had any luck using “gamemoderun” on my System (Gnome, Intel I7, RTX2060), every time I’ve tried it i got really bad/weird performance, try running without it and see what happens.
And GE-Proton or Proton Experimental can sometimes be a bit faster then Proton 7.