Linux

I've been using Bazzite for almost 2 years now, and my... personal experience + amalgamation of all the various benchmarks of linux distros vs windows that I have seen is that basically, its variable per certain games, but generally, Cachy and Bazzite both beat Windows by roughly 5-15%, over a broad selection of games, and Cachy sometimes has a slight edge over Bazzite, and maybe works with brand spanking new games a bit earlier.

So basically maybe slight edge to Cachy, in terms of overall performance, but... its not exactly super clear.

Another way to consider it is that performance gains in Cachy are six to eighteen months ahead of “stable” Linux. But that performance increase does mean things are more likely to break with rolling updates.

you're not going to notice anything that's going to knock your socks off but you might notice like slightly less stutter for fps drop for some things. It does depend on the game though.

I use NixOS with the CachyOS Kernel because I play EVE Online. It's a game that pretty much requires you have multiple clients/accounts going at the same time. For me with the CachyOS kernel if I have 3+ clients open I notice a lot less fps stuttering/lag over say the standard Linux Kernel or even Zen.

At the end of the day, honestly, any distro can pretty much be made into a gaming distro. Stuff like Bazzite, CachyOS, PikaOS are just going to make it "easier" for you because they have stuff installed and configured for gaming in mind by default. easier setup. But unless you're constantly monitoring benchmarks/your FPS then performance increases, if any, aren't going to be groundbreaking.

In my own experience, I've had noticeable performance gains after switching to CachyOS from Bazzite, but I don't have any hard numbers to back it up. Everything just seems to run much smoother/higher fps now then when I was on Bazzite.

For me it was just better support, on my flow z13 bazzite kept freezing the screen, I guess its a reported issue with the display manager. Cachyos doesn't have that issue probably because its much more up to date so fixes have been applied and they take a while to get to fedora then bazzite

Funnily i actually had Bazzite running before i distrohopped to CachyOS. But i havent done any benchmarks tbh. I've seen a few comparisons made by others over the last two years and the differences seem to be negligible. Like 3-5% at best between all the tested distros. But the top spots werent even consistent through all the different tests.

tl;dr no