Comment by yndoendo
9 hours ago
I have not directly used Gentoo in years. It was chosen so I could learn, maximize system performance, and have proper AMD64 support before the other distros supported the new CPU specs. Gentoo also had the best documentation in those years.
Id Software provided a Doom 3 Linux client when the game was first released. I found Doom 3 ran better on a custom built Gentoo Linux system compared to Windows XP.
Are you look at Gentoo to maximize performance with compiling everything with custom build parameters and kernel configuration versus pre-built binaries and a generic kernel loaded with modules?
Custom Gentoo just adds more time with having to wait to install software upgrades. It is like having all your Arch packages only being provided by AUR. There is also a chance the build will fail and the parameters might need to be changed. Majority of the time everything compiles without issue once the build parameters are figured out. It was rare when something did not.
Tecnically with just a kernel optimized for your CPU, realtime patches, NTSync and a custom MESA build (with -O2 and -march set to your CPU) would give a good boost instead of trying to recompile verything.