gaming without a desktop environment?

I'm planning on switching to linux in a few months, and have a question related to optimizing for gaming. I recently learned that most linux distros are basically just kernel and command line, and the desktop environment is a separate thing that runs on top of that and can be replaced. My question is, could I run a game, especially a game that runs in wine/bottles, without a desktop environment running or installed, and if so, how much of an impact would that have on performance?

My plan is to get the steam machine when it comes out, which runs steamOS, which is a modified version of Arch with KDE Plasma, and I'm wondering if I'd be able to just boot without plasma, launch from the command line as a way to squeeze more power out of the hardware (8gb vram, which will be a huge bottleneck for cyberpunk 2077 as an example), but I don't know if it would actually function and display the game without a DE.