Proton Experimental Updated, VKD3D-Proton Moving Closer With Ray-Tracing

Valve continues to be making exciting progress in the realm of Steam Play for improving the experience of running Windows games on Linux.

First up is a new Proton Experimental build now available. This latest Proton Experimental build has more work on reducing CPU overhead and helping performance, memory allocator performance work, support for Futex2 patches in FSYNC when using the latest kernel patches, better non-US keyboard support, improved video support, and a variety of other enhancements. For those with a VR headset, the virtual reality start-up time should be better and with increased compatibility for titles like Microsoft Flight Simulator.

Meanwhile over in VKD3D-Proton space is more work towards supporting DirectX 12 DXR (Ray-Tracing) atop Vulkan ray-tracing extensions.

Ray-tracing support in vkd3d-proton is finally starting to come together. Starting with some meme reflections. pic.twitter.com/29ryW8mo9O

— Hans-Kristian (@Themaister) March 11, 2021

For a while now VKD3D-Proton has been working towards DXR support and they are getting quite close. There is a pull request pending for RT tier 1.0 support

Thanks to Valve, the Linux gaming experience continues advancing quite nicely at least as far as Steam Play / Proton is concerned.