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⇱ KDE Plasma 6.6 Delivers An Impressive Edge For Radeon Graphics Over GNOME 50 On Ubuntu 26.04 - Phoronix

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KDE Plasma 6.6 Delivers An Impressive Edge For Radeon Graphics Over GNOME 50 On Ubuntu 26.04

Written by Michael Larabel in Software on 25 March 2026 at 11:05 AM EDT. Page 4 of 4. 56 Comments.

The Tesseract open-soruce game saw the best performance with Plasma 6.6 on Wayland.

Xonotic was seeing much better performance with Plasma 6.6 than GNOME 50 on Ubuntu 26.04 with the Radeon graphics tested.

Meanwhile for the Unvanquished game the performance was quite close between the two open-source desktop environments tested.

Compared to testing in prior years, it was quite surprising to see KDE Plasma routinely outperforming GNOME. KDE Plasma 6.6 overall is in very nice shape on Wayland and I hadn't encountered any issues in my testing there besides the occasional AMDGPU kernel driver stability issues. Plasma 6.6 is performing very well against GNOME 50 at least for AMD Radeon Linux gaming performance and a larger set of tests are currently being done on Ubuntu 26.04 with NVIDIA Blackwell graphics.

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Michael Larabel is the principal author of Phoronix.com and founded the site in 2004 with a focus on enriching the Linux hardware experience. Michael has written more than 20,000 articles covering the state of Linux hardware support, Linux performance, graphics drivers, and other topics. Michael is also the lead developer of the Phoronix Test Suite, Phoromatic, and OpenBenchmarking.org automated benchmarking software. He can be followed via Twitter, LinkedIn, or contacted via MichaelLarabel.com.