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With KDE Plasma 6.7 now having seen a few point releases to further polish this last version with X11 support ahead of Plasma 6.8 going Wayland-only, here are some NVIDIA Linux gaming benchmarks between the X11 and Wayland sessions on Plasma 6.7.2 using the popular Arch Linux based CachyOS.

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Plasma 6 has matured quite well with Wayland in recent releases and prior benchmarks at Phoronix have already shown the Wayland session with KDE Plasma being able to match or often outperform that of the X11 session. Ahead of Plasma 6.8 dropping the X11 session support, I decided to run some fresh benchmarks looking at the performance between the KDE X11 and Wayland sessions using Plasma 6.7.2 and the latest NVIDIA 610.43.02 drivers as available on CachyOS.

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For this round of testing the Razer Blade 18 was used for benchmarking with its NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5090 discrete graphics. The Razer Blade 18 RZ09-0582 KI8120 v4 is powered by the Intel Core Ultra 9 290HX PLus 24-core Arrow Lake CPU, 2 x 16GB DDR5-6400 memory, GeForce RTX 5090 graphics, and a 2TB Samsung NVMe SSD. As noted in its review, [4]the Razer Blade 18 (2026) is Razer's first device currently being certified for Ubuntu Linux use . This is a powerful mobile workstation whether you're gaming or a developer doing a lot of code compilation and/or AI workloads.

With the up-to-date CachyOS install on the Razer Blade 18, which was working out quite well for this new laptop, I proceeded to run a number of graphics/gaming benchmarks under the default Plasma 6.7.2 Wayland session and then again with the Plasma 6.7.2 X11 session while the rest of the software stack was maintained the same.

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[1] https://www.phoronix.com/image-viewer.php?id=plasma-67-wayland-cachyos&image=kde_plasma_wayland_1_lrg

[2] https://www.phoronix.com/image-viewer.php?id=plasma-67-wayland-cachyos&image=kde_plasma_wayland_2_lrg

[3] https://www.phoronix.com/image-viewer.php?id=plasma-67-wayland-cachyos&image=kde_plasma_wayland_3_lrg

[4] https://www.phoronix.com/review/razer-blade-18-linux

[5] https://www.phoronix.com/image-viewer.php?id=plasma-67-wayland-cachyos&image=kde_plasma_wayland_4_lrg