RadeonSI Benchmarks On Budgie, GNOME Shell, KDE Plasma 5, LXDE, MATE, Unity, Xfce

OpenArena is one of the rare cases where the RadeonSI performance was impacted a bit by the different desktops / window managers, but the performance for this game is already great enough where it's more than playable with nearly any modern graphics card. The OpenArena numbers for what they're worth showed KDE Plasma 5 (with compositing enabled) and Unity 7 at the low-end while LXDE and GNOME Shell were among the fastest.

A look at the OpenArena-generated frame-times for each of the desktops.

Tesseract meanwhile performed the slowest on MATE and Xfce while the other desktops saw around the same speed. Again, for any relatively new AMD graphics card on RadeonSI, the frame-rates are more than playable even at 4K.

Unigine Heaven's performance wasn't impacted by the tested desktops with the R9 Fury system on RadeonSI via Mesa Git.

Xonotic saw a few frame jump when running with KDE Plasma 5, but barely relevant like the other tests already running at hundreds of FPS.

Well, that's why I hadn't done a RadeonSI desktop comparison previously. The performance with a Radeon R9 graphics card paired with newer Mesa for best performance is basically the same across the tested desktops, compared to the less-powerful Intel graphics where there were more performance changes to see by the different desktops / window managers. The few tests that did see differing performance were the lighter games like Xonotic and OpenArena that are already running at high frame-rates and wouldn't really see a major impact by running the desktop of your choice.