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

[phoronix]

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

Valve's Linux developers today released Proton 4.11 as the newest release of their Wine-based software that powers Steam Play for running Windows games on Linux under the Steam client...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Proton-4.11-Released

[Templar82]

I'm continually blown away by how well his project is going, looking forward to all the fixes this latest Wine rebase will bring.

[skeevy420]

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.

[treba]

Wow, now I wonder if this work will be beneficial for other heavy threaded applications as well, for example Firefox. I guess Rust would need to support it first?

[M@GOid]

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). 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.

[kenjitamura]

Why DXVK 1.3? Wasn't it immediately followed by DXVK 1.3.1 because there were several regressions in 1.3?

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). 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.

Have you been looking at the protonDB before trying the games? According to it only 3 Call of Duty games and Arkham Origins are listed as working well.

[Guest]

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). 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.

I've had no issues with running whatever I wanted in Proton. There's protondb for games that don't work out of the box. I'm not surprised that CoD games don't run, as Treyarch games tend to simply not work in Proton.

i don't think AAA games are worth playing.

[R41N3R]

Now I'm impressed! This is awesome, I've used D9VK already for most my directx9 games without any issue and I hoped that this would happen at some point :-)

[Werner99]

Why DXVK 1.3? Wasn't it immediately followed by DXVK 1.3.1 because there were several regressions in 1.3?

according to github it is 1.3.1 seems like changelog is wrong

update dxvk to v1.3-1-g03c6df56

https://github.com/ValveSoftware/Proton/commits/proton_4.11

[humbug]

Pierre-Loup Griffais's post on the steam forums below had more interesting info about related work they are doing.

Today we are releasing the first build of Proton 4.11, based on Wine 4.11. Among the usual variety of functional fixes[github.com], as well as a new Vulkan-based D3D9 implementation, it also includes a significant amount of work on reducing CPU overhead for multithreaded games. We observed the following performance gains when forcing a CPU-bound scenario on a high-end machine by reducing graphics details to a minimum:



We expect such gains to be reproducible on more realistic settings with a lower-end machine.

It also includes an experimental replacement for esync[github.com]. Last year, as we were ramping up Proton development, we identified several blocking performance issues with multithreaded games. CodeWeavers then worked on developing the esync patchset to address them. While we think that was very successful, there's certain tradeoffs associated with it: because it relies on the kernel's eventfd() functionality, esync needs special setup and can cause file descriptor exhaustion problems in event-hungry applications. We think it also results in extraneous spinning in the kernel, compared to what an optimal implementation would be.

As such, we're proposing changes to the Linux kernel[lkml.org] to extend the futex() system call to expose what we think is the needed extra bit of core functionality needed to support optimal thread pool synchronization. Proton 4.11 includes the fsync patchset, which will leverage this new Linux kernel functionality to replace esync when supported. For more technical details, refer to the link to the proposed kernel changes above.

We are also posting proof-of-concept glibc patches[github.com] for upstream review and discussion; these patches expose the corresponding kernel functionality as part of the pthread library. We think that if this feature (or an equivalent) was adopted upstream, we would achieve efficiency gains by adopting it in native massively-threaded applications such as Steam and the Source 2 engine.

As usual, testing our theories and uncovering the last few bugs will involve a lot of testing; we have prepared packages for Ubuntu and Arch containing the necessary kernel patches to test fsync with Proton 4.11; for more information, please see this forum thread.

https://steamcommunity.com/games/221410/announcements/detail/2957094910196249305