KDE Plasma 6.6 Showing Frequent Performance Advantage Over GNOME 50 With NVIDIA R595 Driver
KDE Plasma 6.6 Showing Frequent Performance Advantage Over GNOME 50 With NVIDIA R595 Driver
https://www.phoronix.com/review/nvidia-595-kde-gnome
Publish Date: 2026-03-27 11:24:00
Source Domain: www.phoronix.com
Earlier this week I provided benchmarks looking at KDE Plasma 6.6’s performance advantage over GNOME 50 for Linux gaming with AMD Radeon graphics. That raised the question if the same was true when using NVIDIA graphics with their official Linux graphics driver stack. Here are such benchmarks looking at the KDE Plasma 6.6 and GNOME 50 performance on Ubuntu 26.04 beta while using the new NVIDIA 595.58.03 Linux driver.
While having the new System76 Thelio Mira in the lab, I used that for running these NVIDIA graphics/gaming benchmarks of KDE Plasma vs. GNOME desktop with the GeForce RTX 5080 (Blackwell) graphics card.
In the Ubuntu 26.04 archive as of this week was GNOME 50.0 and KDE Plasma 6.6.3. The new NVIDIA 595.58.03 graphics driver was used for this testing between these two competing desktop environments.
While the Radeon tests featured KDE Plasma with both the Wayland and X11 sessions, for this NVIDIA testing only the Plasma 6.6.3 Wayland session was tested. Logging into the KDE Plasma X11 session on this NVIDIA system was just immediately crashing on start-up.
Page 1 – IntroductionPage 2 – GravityMark, Batman, Counter-Strike 2, 3DMarkPage 3 – Cyberpunk 2077, DDNet, DiRT Rally 2, HITMANPage 4 – Strange Brigade, Superposition, Unvanquished, XonoticPage 5 – Other Graphics Benchmarks
