If the distro just boots into a live session, you can get a pretty good idea there. They're all working off of roughly the same kernel and driver and firmware sets, give or take some distros being a year out of date. The slower distros have something like "backports" or "enablement kernels" to still give you the option of pulling in newer stuff.

The graphics situation (compositor and mesa and kernel drivers and userland driver libraries) is more complicated. Especially with Nvidia. Your distro choice makes a much bigger impact there.