Last week when delivering some CachyOS benchmarks against Fedora 43 and Ubuntu 25.10 on the Framework Desktop with AMD Ryzen AI Max+, a few Phoronix readers wrote in with the question or belief that openSUSE Tumbleweed would better perform against CachyOS given the distribution’s select x86_64-v3 packages and other advantages. As it’s been a while since running any benchmarks of the rolling-release openSUSE Tumbleweed, here are those benchmarks now in the mix for seeing how the performance compares.
This is only relevant for people exclusively running open source games from the distro’s repository.
Steam games (incl. the Windows games on top of Proton) run inside Steam Linux Runtime, a container based on Debian 11 that is identical on every distribution. Use whatever distribution you like but the optimizations of CachyOS are mostly pointless.
Though I assume performance can still vary by host kernel, right?
Sure. That’s why I wrote “mostly pointless” but the runtime stack is self-contained in Steam and proprietary games are compiled by the developer anyway. There are limits to what CachyOS/Gentoo/… can do.