u/4Klassic

It's not the first time I go to cachyOS just to check how is a game performing on cachyOS vs Mint.

In fact it all started, with an Unreal Engine 5 game, I just installed a demo called WILL on Steam, and I have W11 and Mint 22.3 installed.

I don't even care about the game, but I needed to compare.

Windows does perform better, much better in that game, where most of the games are just similar performance and some wins for mint 22.3.

So I though it could be a Mint issue, I end up formatting the SSD and installed CachyOS with KDE just for science, I even activated the new VRAM package
Well, yes, performance was better, on average is 3 FPS better.

Good gaming experience, but regarding the DE experience,

KDE is just bloated with options, very counter-intuitive (yes I know i can use cinammon on Cachy), and I was expecting KDE to be prettier out of the box, it has those gradient colors based on the desktop color, but still, the file explorer, the image viewer, the player, jezz everything seem just bloated and ugly :/

Cinammon, might not have the better rendering beautiful options out of the box too.
But, it is so intuitive, most of apps are simple and good looking.
And in the end, I still think that most of the performance improvements from cachy, might come from the latest kernel and maybe and especially the latest mesa driver.

So in the end, the difference exists, but not really sure if it worth it.

EDIT: BTW specs
R5 3600x
16GB (2x8GB DDR IV 3600MHZ)
RX 6700XT 12GB
Crucial MX500 512GB SSD