The LXQt desktop has been described as a "light-weight" desktop, compared to the Unity or Gnome desktops, and is thought to be a perfect choice for low-powered computers. I had reasoned that if the response of applications run on the LXQt deskop was satisfactory on low-powered computers, it would be blazingly fast on a high-end computer. I am not sure I picked the proper applications to compare LXQt to other desktop environments, but none-the-less, the results surprised me.
I used two tests to measure responsiveness, both designed to test the speed of 3D-rendering. These were glmark2 from Linaro and glxspheres from VirtualGL. My high-end laptop computer is an ASUS ROG GL752VW. Its graphics card is an Nvidia GeForce Optimus GTX 960M. The base distribution I installed is Ubuntu-17.10 and the installed kernel is 4.13.0-16-generic #19-Ubuntu. The results for a variety of conditions are shown in the following two tables:
Three observations may be made. The first is that, in agreement with the observation made in the Ubuntu-17.10 DistroWatch review, Ubuntu on Wayland seems as least as peppy, if not peppier than the older standard Ubuntu on Xorg. The second is that both benchmarks of 3D-rendering seemed to reveal better performance under the Ubuntu-Xorg ubuntu:GNOME desktop as compared to under the LXQt-0.12 desktop. The third observation is that the Nvidia proprietary drivers certainly speed up 3D rendering. Ubuntu on Wayland could no longer be run once the proprietary Nividia 384.90 drivers were installed.
I can think of several reasons which might explain the surprising performance comparison between the GNOME and LXQt desktops. I have no reason to choose among them so I will simply list them. 1) It is possible Ubuntu has improved the GNOME desktop so that it should no longer be considered a "heavy desktop". 2) Possibly the 0.12 version of LXQt is not as "light" as previous versions. 3) It may be that the tests I chose to compare the two desktops are not good ones for that purpose since presumably they challenge the graphics processor (GPU) rather than the central processor (CPU).