CachyOS vs Omarchy - 5 Games Benchmarked And The Results Speak For Themselves

CachyOS is hyped as the ultimate gaming distro. Optimised kernels, CPU-specific binaries, tweaked packages. So it must be faster than standard Arch, right? I benchmarked five games on both to find out.

You find the scripts on the site for Omarchy and the CachyOS launcher.

https://www.no-signal.uk

You can download Omarchy here https://omarchy.org

THE METHODOLOGY

Clean install of CachyOS and clean install of Omarchy (standard Arch) on the same SSD, same hardware — 5060 Ti, Ryzen 9. Both running my Gamescope Steam Deck mode launcher so the desktop environment is completely shut down during testing. No Plasma, no Hyprland, just Gamescope talking to the GPU. Same version of Proton GE on both. Same game settings. Same resolution at 1440p.

For each game I configured settings, shut down Steam, relaunched, ran the benchmark three times consecutively, and took the average. First launch is always weird so the consecutive runs give you the real numbers.

THE POINT

When you strip away the desktop environment and run games through a pure Gamescope session, you're just dealing with Linux. CachyOS has kernel optimisations and CPU-specific tuning, but in practice the difference is negligible for gaming. One to two frames across five demanding games is within margin of error.

If you're the type who tweaks kernels and scheduler settings to squeeze out every last frame, CachyOS gives you more knobs to turn. But out of the box, standard Arch performs identically. The distro underneath matters far less than people think once the desktop compositor is out of the equation.

WHY THIS MATTERS

People keep asking whether Omarchy should switch to CachyOS repos, or whether my hybrid build is essential for gaming performance. Based on these numbers — no. Omarchy on standard Arch is golden. The hybrid is a fun project for tinkerers but it's not solving a performance problem that actually exists.

Both are great distros. CachyOS is flexible and powerful. Omarchy is focused, productive, and beautiful out of the box. Pick the one that fits how you work. Don't pick based on benchmark hype.

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