My PC is AMD Ryzen 3700x, 32gb ram, AMD 6650 8GB GPU
Using MESA AMD Vulkan drivers.
I have tested both DEs, clean vanilla installs, same drivers, same everything and despite what the reviews said about resources usage for KDE being on par (slightly higher) than Xfce and praising it, this game is undoubtedly hugely affected.
I haven’t tested other games, but ESO is borderline nonplayable on KDE. Despite having a steady FPS, the movement in the game is not fluid but chopped. Eventually it was so bad for my eyes that I felt dizzy.
I’d say XFCE out of the box experience for this game is only one or two percent lower than the native W11 one, maybe it’s even the same. Maybe there’s no any difference at all. Compared to KDE, it’s night and day.
My system is certainly not ‘old’ or deprecated, far from it. But Xfce still proves to offer best resources for apps where it’s needed.
Neither. I hope my post will be useful for potential ESO players running on Linux with similar hardware. If they get into problems to not give up or waste hours trying.
Game was installed on a separate ext4 partition on a fast M.2 drive.
Both DEs used same drivers, same Steam settings. KDE & Xfce were at vanilla settings generally. Fresh, clean install for both. RAM usage was very similar, around 5-8GB, no swap. KDE was super fast by itself, Xfce ditto.
PS. One of my first guesses might be baloo, the indexer, which will be quite greedy indexing your storage after initial install.
No. That was one of my guesses too. I excluded that and stopped it entirely. There was no indexing going. Also on both DEs I disabled several services that were not needed for me like Bluetooth, touch display, though I doubt those affected anything.
So … not ‘stock’ or ‘default everything’ like you first described.
Sorry, what? Disabling two unrelated services on both DEs and trying the game with and without the indexer on KDE is suddenly ‘not stock’? No, indexer didn’t do anything for the performance.
No other apps or drivers were installed except those that came with Manjaro install and Steam.
My guess would be KDE is on wayland and xfce on x11.
Sorry to say but your guess is wrong. Default for Manjaro is X11 and there was no Wayland involved anywhere. Both DEs used X11 only.
All I’m going to say is I’m sure Steam would not have selected KDE Plasma as their under-the-hood DE if it wasn’t the most user-friendly, stable, and if not the best performing a close second.
I do not have a steam console, but i am pretty sure they have heavily customized kde there. The default desktop version of kde is for sure the most user friendly (meaning has every possible gimmick as an option in the gui), but it is definitely not the most stable and not the most resource sparing DE. It is certainly one of the heaviest, and judging by the forum topics here, the rapid development makes it not the most stable thing that exists.