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.

Proton 4.11 is a big one with the key change being a re-base from Wine 4.2 to Wine 4.11. This big Wine upgrade brings "more than 3,300 improvements" with now being close to the upstream state of Wine.

In addition, Proton 4.11 takes things further by now shipping D9VK (v0.13f) as the experimental Vulkan-based Direct3D 9 implementation that's been gaining steam recently for those using it for a faster D3D9 Linux gaming experience. But for now this D9VK support is only enabled via the PROTON_USE_D9VK setting. Meanwhile for newer Direct3D-over-Vulkan support, DXVK 1.3 has made it into Proton 4.11.

Other work in Proton 4.11 includes an experimental support for futex-based in-process sync primitives to help with lower CPU usage compared to Esync (though depends upon yet-to-be-merged kernel patches), support for new OpenVR SDKs, FAudio 19.07, more work towards supporting DRM/anti-cheat systems, and various other updates and fixes.

More details on the huge Proton 4.11 update via GitHub.