Valve Rolls Out Wine-based "Proton" For Running Windows Games On Linux

[mv.gavrilov]

It's awful because I am afraid that due this count of native Linux games will be decreased.
Anyway I want that money spended for such games will get only Proton developers. Because original game developers not support Linux.

[moilami]

This is wonderful news. I would find it not a very good development if this was a closed source solution, because that would end in Steam-only support. And that would cause developers creating games for Steam instead of the OS, which would be really bad for the competition or independent publishers. But no, Valve nicely contributed all these features to the opensource projects and did it the Linux way!

I think this emulation is also good for the long term, because it could make it possible to keep old games compatible with new OSes and hardware. This advantage you don't have with native ports. The same way how new DirectX versions break compatibility with games that depend on an older version. On Linux this issue is more common, because the libraries that games depend on have multiple developers, each with their own ideas. This kind of emulation and open source drivers and tools could be a really great thing for gaming overall.

The Valve is god sent.

[makam]

Stalker SoC might be well worth it.

[makam]

Not really. If Linux marketshare goes up, more companies will be looking into native ports, and will seek to employ port developers. It means more work for them, actually...

Also, this may ease their workload as they could reuse parts of proton when porting.

[theriddick]

It's good they are TESTING games before adding them in, perhaps a community driven testing group can be made for people to help shuffle that along faster because there are just insane amount of games you'd need to test.

Anyway this is going to fundamentally change the ecosystem of Linux gaming eventually because many people will refuse to install 3rd party apps to play any of their games, but if steam just allows it natively, well that's a good thing. Hopefully they focus on getting PUBG/Fortnite/Overwatch tested for people to enjoy, even though I don't play those games I know they will bring in the numbers which is what Linux gaming community needs to attract developer attention!

[L_A_G]

In hindsight the only real surprise is that it took this long for Valve to cook up something like this.

Still, the announcement of the sequel to the 2016 reboot of Doom made me interested in going back and playing it and this made me even more interested in doing just that, except without having to boot into Windows to do so like I did when it came out. Seems like the need for Windows on my machine has now been reduced to the occasional Windows build and whenever I relapse on World of Warcraft (thou even for the latter actually booting into Windows may be unnecessary).

[Cerberus]

This looks interesting, but performance of demanding games like Witcher 3 is what interests me, if the performance loss is significant this wont be as useful as it looks. I am not willing to lose 10 or 20 fps just to play Windows games on Linux. It would be great if they can achieve near Windows performance but I will be contain my enthusiasm until I see demanding AAA games tested with Proton.

[theriddick]

I have tested witcher 3 with DXVK and at 4k with custom high settings on my 1080ti, basically this

Linux DXVK 0.60 FPS: 42
Windows 10 FPS: 58

However it might be better now with the new beta drivers and newer DXVK versions. At 1080p and 1440p its more then playable, but 4k is touch and go with DXVK but next gen cards will likely resolve that shortcoming.

[shmerl]

I have tested witcher 3 with DXVK and at 4k with custom high settings on my 1080ti, basically this

Linux DXVK 0.60 FPS: 42
Windows 10 FPS: 58

However it might be better now with the new beta drivers and newer DXVK versions. At 1080p and 1440p its more then playable, but 4k is touch and go with DXVK but next gen cards will likely resolve that shortcoming.

Framerate is not an issue if you use something more reasonable than 4K. Such resolutions are too high yet no matter what cards you use. As you said, next generation cards can be more suitable. The main remaining issue now is missing stream output support in dxvk.

[theriddick]

Stream output support has for the most part been worked around, only a few games have components that must be disabled to run correctly.

Stream Output support may eventually appear in Vulkan API, I dunno when but perhaps sometime. Just takes developers to work on it and submit to chronos, along with support for the feature.