Best Distro for Gaming?

So im interested, after playing CS:GO today on ubuntu for the first time i found it to be noticably laggier than on windows(my PC is shite anyways but it went from 90-100fps to 30-70fps). After looking around a bit i found that it was most likley the fact that I have AMD graphics, but in searching I also found that many people (not all in the same place) had noticed that gaming on ubuntu was, in their benchmarks around 10-15% slower than on windows. In a few of the forums specifically some had mentioned how their framerates on XFCE were better than on windows. So my question(s) comes down to this, which distros perform better or worse than on Windows, which distros are able to run games the faster than on Windows; and out of these distros is friendliest towards Linux newcomers? I feel like this kind of information might be a good incentive to get the more hardcore gaming audience like myself to try dualbooting to get better framerates on whatever games they own that work on Linux. In the coming days I'll set up Windows 10 (I would use Windows 7 but its a long story) and run some benchmarks in some of the major Distros like ubuntu, XFCE ect. and Windows and compile the info. If anyone who dualboots wants to help collect information on their distro, just write down your PC specs, distro what version of Windows you have. Now lets discuss!
TL;DR= the title

Lol, I am just gonna come right out and say it. Ubuntu is absolute shit right now. Lots of people seem to be having issues and I have tried to work through a lot of the bugs the last 2 weeks, but it is just a freaking mess.

I still have hope for ubuntu, and I am not trying to be a linux snob, but ubuntu really dropped the ball.

I recommend either opensuse, fedora (I would hold off for like a week for the final release of fedora 22), or vanilla debian (linux mint debian is a good choice, and I also like neptune as well).

I am running opensuse tumbleweed with the latest kernel. I have gnome 3.16 and the latest mesa drivers. I have all sorts of crazy unstable packages and yet I have far less problems than I do right now on my ubuntu drive which is basically just a solid hard drive of problems.

Try Sabayon

Hmmmmmm.....

If nothing else it is an interesting suggestion. The only reason I would feel hesitant about recommending sabayon is that it is gentoo based which might not be the best for a new user.

Ubuntu/Debian with a lightweight DE like LXDE or XFCE. It offers better support, imo, for GPU drivers and overall software.

Not really. To get the latest opensource drivers, you gotta mess around with edgers.

However if you have a 600-700 series NVDIA card and you want to use the proprietary drivers, then linux mint debian is fairly strong.

You can game roughly the same way in most big distros. If you have to chose I would say Ubuntu-based stuff and Linux Mint that are declared to be officially supported by the Linux ports and Manjaro that officially supports Steam. BTW XFCE is not a distro but a GUI environment. The reason why stuff in XFCE runh faster is because the environment is very lightweight. All the distros I mentioned have out-of-the-box XFCE versions.

Mint you can either have the typical version based on ubuntu or the LMDE based on debian (both very stable and easy to use). The latest LMDE is really good for general use. For newcomers I would suggest the ubuntu-based, though, because for more options of ubuntu packages.

Also any Ubuntu one you chose I suggest the last LTS version since the more recent ones tend to have some stability issues.

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So after installing Windows 10 i noticed almost double the frame-rate in Final Fantasy 14 compared to what i used to get. Also, whats your guys opinion on the distro Play Linux?

I'll check those out. Also, you reminded me of this

never heard of it, I'll take a look

I know, I'm just curious about this, and thought it would make a good topic. It would be interesting to see a spreadsheet or something of the sort detailing benchmarks and other important things pertaining to performance, as it's useful information to have.

See I am using an AMD 290X and I am doing just fine with mesa 10.5 on opensuse and I have the same experience with fedora and even arch.

Edit: lol, did you see the linux redit anime video?

Distribution will not play any role, all will preform the same (more or less). If gaming is important for you, do dual-boot, and for games that work well on Linux, well, use Linux.

Fun fact, on AMD drivers (depending on GPU), some games work better in Wine than native, so, there is pretty much nothing (very little) you can do until drivers become better.

Have you tried Windows? That works pretty well with most games out there these days.

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Anything debian based with decent driver support, simply because steam is now openly supporting them. That would be debian, ubuntu, mint, or steamOS and maybe some others I can't think of right now. If the current release of ubuntu doesn't satisfy you you can use 14.04 lts or mint, which is what I'd go for in your shoes. Be careful if you choose xfce, I like the environment a lot but last time I tried it it didn't like my 4k monitor much and was stuttering all over the place.

I was also curious about this. I'm running Ubuntu Gnome 15.04 on my laptop, and it can be quite buggy sometimes. I was thinking about switching to Debian Jessie and installing Gnome 3 on top. I tried the Ubuntu version of linux mint, and while it was very stable for what I wanted, I just couldn't get used to the desktop environment. They say its modern, but it felt like I was on Gnome 2 with regards to the panels. For some people that's great, I still like Gnome 3 with a few tweaks. I may give Linux Mint Debian a shot though.

As far as graphics drivers go, they all seem to suck. They are better out of the box thanks to nouveau, but anything proprietary is still mediocre. Despite having SLI on my laptop (GT 650m), I don't use it for gaming.

Ubuntu 14.04.2 is still an option as well.

If you're looking to do heavy gaming, just use Windows. Seriously. Linux just isn't worth it right now. I use Linux 100% of the time, and I game occasionally.

If you don't mind buggy as all hell drivers and a smaller selection of games then Linux is great, and realistically any distro should have very similar performance. I game very occasionally so the slightly buggy AMD drivers and smaller game library is completely fine for me.

I hear you man, I too suffer from extremely poor linux cs go performance with my 270x card.
For me it doesn't matter if I'm running open source or proprietary drivers, or which distro I use (Arch, debian, ubuntu, fedora), they all perform horridly. Especially when I press tab for scores, the overlay somehow makes my frame rate plummet. It's just a bad port.