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

[oooverclocker]

THANK YOU GABEN!

This is revolutionary. This makes Linux a platform where more and more everything runs. And it runs with one single click - and exactly this is what people need to change their OS. Wine was a weak argument before. Now it became a super weapon.

• Proton will make more people go for Linux (and SteamOS) and improve our market share
• Proton will acquire more users that test Proton games
• As a result other companies will more likely port their software to Linux because of the bigger market.
• Proton will increase the use of the Vulkan API because these games do run with native speed with Wine! It is a real killer of proprietary graphics APIs.

To the skeptics:
I used to believe that Wine destroys our open source infrastructure not so long ago. But DXVK made me overthink this view.
Platforms cooperating with the community to pre-package Wine Software is the key to our market share issues on desktop systems. And this is the first thing that needs to be solved before we can convince the remaining game developers of Linux.

We should take this amazing chance and help as much as possible by

• Improving DXVK
• Improving Wine
• Testing these games
• Convincing developers to use Vulkan as graphics API

Developers will automatically release native versions once the market share has increased to something similar to OS X market share.

[theriddick]

Proton/DXVK will at the very least help developers translate their games to Vulkan natively. If the game does it in-engine itself then its certainly going to be faster than DXVK doing it for them!

[TemplarGR]

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.

I am surprised they haven't already added it to Vulkan. It is a widely used feature.

[stingray454]

Wonderful news! I'm already using Lutris, Gaming on Linux and such for games but having the entire steam library work out-of-the-box in a well tested and well integrated solution is huge. Definitely a way for Steam to increase earnings, but well deserved imo. I'll definitely buy a couple of interesting games now. It also goes a long way towards me converting 100% to Linux instead of dual booting, so.. Year of the Linux desktop is one step closer?

[TemplarGR]

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.

It's ok, when Windows begin charging money for updates like they want, close their market to the Windows marketplace, continue spying on you with telemetry etc, you can still use Windows in order to not lose 10fps...

[epaaj]

Why ? Anything native should be better than that crap wine

There are many "native" Linux games that are not well made. I've read that Company of Heroes 2 has separated Linux and Windows multiplayer so you can't play with friends with the other platform. In these cases it would be nice to play the Windows version even if a Linux version exists.

[LinAGKar]

So does this run the DOS version of DOOM inside the Windows version of DosBox inside Wine?

How about putting the native Linux versions of DOOM and Quake up there?

[makam]

So does this run the DOS version of DOOM inside the Windows version of DosBox inside Wine?

How about putting the native Linux versions of DOOM and Quake up there?

I always wished that the native Linux version of Return to castle Wolfenstein was on Steam.

[RussianNeuroMancer]

How about putting the native Linux versions of DOOM and Quake up there?

Valve can't do this on their own and ZeniMax refuse to do so.

[rockyjvec]

I tried several old games that have stopped working in the later versions of Windows. Some of these games have been removed from the store because they don't work anymore. They work great in Proton/Linux out of the box. It would be funny if games like these eventually get added back to the store as Linux only games because they stopped working in Windows.