I would be suspicious of that being the display server as much as the OS, though... although, granted, I suppose it depends on what the fair basis is for compar

I would be suspicious of that being the display server as much as the OS, though... although, granted, I suppose it depends on what the fair basis is for comparison. A person could argue that "performance of the default graphical stack" is at least as important as "performance of a CPU-bound workload if you tune everything else".