Having tried many, I found that the desktop environments matter more than the actual OS, especially on older machines.
Going for something really light, like openbox, lxde, or xfce, caused less frame rate drop and stuttering. At least on my lower powered mini pc.
I had a beelink ser5, and without giving you the bench marks, I can tell you that many games that were unplayable on cinnamon or kde, did work in openbox. I would log out and back into that DE just to play games.
Just my observation. I have upgraded my PC so I haven’t needed to repeat that with my new one.