Proton Re-Based To Wine 4.11, Adds D9VK Direct3D 9, Better CPU Utilization & DXVK 1.3

[Degra]

Great news, I have to give it a try with Guild Wars 2, that have always work really poorly on my computer no matter if using plain Wine, D9VK or what. I suspect my FX-8350 is not the most convenient CPU for running this game on Linux.

The FX 8350 is generally a bad choice for running GW2, and that includes Windows.
GW2's CPU hunger is huge, and it's very badly single-thread performance limited. A Ryzen 3000 or Intel ix-9000 would be a BIG upgrade over that.

[Brisse]

Report them, otherwise they will never get fixed.

D9VK is also opt-in for now, not enabled by default.

Exactly, and bundling D9VK is great for people like me who would like to participate in testing and bug reporting but have been to lazy to install it manually.

[grndzro]

Is Vulkan still in the shitter for GCN 1.0 cards? Would this work for Radeon 7850?

[Nocifer]

For now, Proton is a big disappointment for me. Most AAA, big name games on my library doesn't work (Batman' Arkham games, Call of Dutys), some that do work have huge problems (Rage for example, big artifacts on screen).

The only reason Proton could be a disappointment to someone, would be if that someone were expecting miracles and/or desired instant gratification. Proton at this point in time is working great for a large number of titles and almost great for an even larger number of titles. The real problem (which is not really a problem if one understands how these things work) is that "almost great" usually involves at least one thing in the chain which is not yet working (e.g. the WMF issue) but which is crucial to the whole operation, and without which the game simply will not work at all (at least not without the tweaks you mentioned) even if the rest of the pieces already fit and work perfectly.

But that is precisely why Proton is still tagged as "in development" and has not been released to the general public, nor been featured in any marketing campaigns by Valve. It's simply not ready yet to be a headache-free replacement for Windows gaming. That does not mean though that it is a "disappointment", rather the opposite I'd say, it's one of the best things come to the Linux world since Linux itself.

If I have to do tons of teaks to get things working, I'm better installing Windows on a partition and getting better performance.

Will stick to my policy to only buy games explicitly released for Linux, with a developer behind making sure things just work.

If you treat games like a mass-produced commodity, randomly picking stuff based on your whims, then I suppose this could work. But for those of us who like to treat games as a medium of art (however one may wish to define art) and buy them on a case by case basis based on their individual qualities (like one used to buy books or music albums in the past, for example), we don't have the privilege to choose based on such irrelevant (to the medium) things like which platform the developer (or rather, their publisher) has chosen to support.

If I want to play NieR:Automata, for example, I can't afford to say "hey, it does not support Linux so I won't buy it" because I do want to buy it and play it. But I also don't want to keep an otherwise useless Windows installation around, just to be able to play NieR:Automata. Not to mention the fact that I'd love to, in the near future, be able to tell people "hey, you wanna game on your PC? no worries, Linux can do it just as well". And I really don't want to depend on the devs' (or their publishers') whims on whether or not to support Linux.

Hence the need for Proton, Wine, DXVK, et al. (and also for console emulators - I'm still waiting for the day when I can play The Last of Us on my PC, because I refuse to play it on a PS4 :P)

[cute2dgirl]

Bold move with D9VK. It has rendering glitches with the games I tried it with, but I guess maybe it does work well for some.

Report them, otherwise they will never get fixed.

D9VK is also opt-in for now, not enabled by default.

[madmalkav]

Great news, I have to give it a try with Guild Wars 2, that have always work really poorly on my computer no matter if using plain Wine, D9VK or what. I suspect my FX-8350 is not the most convenient CPU for running this game on Linux.

[Venemo]

Bold move with D9VK. It has rendering glitches with the games I tried it with, but I guess maybe it does work well for some.

[ryao]

Proton, ACO, now fsync patches for the kernel, patches for glibc, supporting DX*K development, and so much more...

Can't wait for my fsync enabled kernel to compile so I can try all these new things out.

Linux gaming news has been so freakin awesome this past year.

Proton is not even 1 year old. Some games that required workarounds in the past don't require as many work arounds anymore.

• A Hat in Time works perfectly when D9VK is enabled (otherwise, there is a known rendering bug involving rain in stage 1-3).
• Age of Empires II just works.
• Age of Empries III needs `protontricks 105450 mfc42 winxp l3codecx`, which is much simpler than what it needed in the past.
• Rise of Nations only needs `protontricks 287450 directmusic` (and possibly also sound=alsa on systems that lack pulseaudio due to a wine bug, but I didn't test to see if that still is present).

These games all needed much more in the past. Things like corefonts, .NET, xaudio, launcher bypasses, etcetera were needed by at least some of the ones on this short list. Now all of those issues are gone.

I also hit some issues when testing Proton 4.11 against games where the issues reportedly also affect Windows:

• Shattered Union crashes. Reportedly, it will crash on Windows systems with more than 2GB of RAM.
• Skyrim fails to exit properly when Dawnguard is installed. Removing Dawnguard makes it appear to be perfect.
• Company of Heroes crashes when loading the graphical benchmark (I didn't test gameplay). This reportedly happens on Windows in gameplay when graphical settings are too high. The issue is somewhat worse on Linux than on Windows, but crashes from graphical settings being too high happens on both. Setting PROTON_FORCE_LARGE_ADDRESS_AWARE=1 enabled it to work.

It is not nice when things fail in Proton, but it is nice when the failures are ones that also affect Windows.

[audir8]

FSYNC sounds interesting, hopefully they can get everything up-streamed. Alpha Protocol FPS takes a nose dive with D9VK, but starts and works, so definitely great to see.

[ryao]

according to github it is 1.3.1 seems like changelog is wrong

update dxvk to v1.3-1-g03c6df56
https://github.com/ValveSoftware/Pro...ts/proton_4.11

You are right. It has an extra patch to fix Dirt Rally:

https://github.com/ValveSoftware/dxvk/commit/03c6df56c1a114a2eda77acd49eda865e6363679