Proton 4.11-3 is out

[ryao]

Changelog:

 

• Games will now attempt to access gamepads directly, instead of Proton emulating gamepads as if they were Xbox controllers. This means PlayStation 4 gamepads as well as fighting gamepads and other controllers will behave much more like they do on Windows. If you would like your gamepad to be emulated as if it were an Xbox controller, please use the Steam client controller mapping feature. If the controller cannot be accessed directly, due to a permissions issue, it will continue to be presented like an Xbox controller.
• fsync hang and crash fixes.
• Add support for fsync configurable spin count, might help performance but disabled by default. Try setting WINEFSYNC_SPINCOUNT=100
• Add missing Chinese, Japanese, and Korean language font.
• Fix in-game web browser in some games including Bloons TD 6.
• Fix new crashes related to text input, especially in Unreal Engine 4 games including Mordhau and Deep Rock Galactic.
• Update D9VK to 0.20.
• Improve support for very old VR titles.
• Support for latest Steamworks and OpenVR SDK versions.

https://github.com/ValveSoftware/Proton/wiki/Changelog

 

A highlight is D9VK 0.20. It’s changelog is huge:

 

https://github.com/Joshua-Ashton/d9vk/releases/tag/0.20

 

One guy is maintaining a list of Direct3D 9 titles that he has and how well they work with D9VK. The number of fixed games is large and this is just a partial list:

 

 

A Hat in Time experiences better frame rates for me with D9VK than it does with Windows 7’s implementation. There is no in game benchmark, but the numbers for looking at the room in the space ship while bouncing on the cheeseburger on my GeForce GTX 1070 are roughly:

 

150 FPS Windows 7 native

170 FPS Windows 7 D9VK

160 FPS Proton 4.11-3 D9VK

 

I did not do recent tests on Proton without D9VK, but my recollection is that performance is less than half of those numbers without it. The driver versions were 431.60 on Windows and 430.40 on Linux, which despite the version number differences, should be equivalent.

 

It should be noted that D9VK must be explicitly enabled through the launch options per game because it is still experimental. Doing `PROTON_USE_D9VK=1 %command%` will enable it. There is some minor stutter in D9VK, but this goes away quickly and stays gone across runs due to the state cache.

 

Lastly, the change does not mention a few fixes. One of the unmentioned fixes is a fix to make “Are you ready for Valve Index?” stop crashing that I wrote last week:

 

https://github.com/ValveSoftware/Proton/issues/2616

 

It is awesome how responsive Valve has been to a third party developer fixing it for them. That software still has a couple issues such as detecting Linux as Windows 7 (the target for Proton at the moment) and failing to detect USB 3.0 support, but not crashing is a nice step forward.

[williamcll]

Nice, what is the best linux for games right now?

[ryao]

8 minutes ago, williamcll said:

Nice, what is the best linux for games right now?

There is no single best, but PopOS! is extremely popular for gaming right now.

 

I use Gentoo. You would get up and running faster with PopOS! though.

[WereCat]

25 minutes ago, williamcll said:

Nice, what is the best linux for games right now?

Pop! _OS is a good way to start without having to mess with drivers. 

[Bananasplit_00]

26 minutes ago, williamcll said:

Nice, what is the best linux for games right now?

probably Pop if you want ubuntu based, Manjaro if you want Arch based. Im partial to Manjaro, really liking it as my daily  

[suicidalfranco]

Meanwhile at Epic: "guys we need to find a way that allows people to buy more than one game at a time. Some kind of digital container where people can add stuff to it as they scroll through the items and have to checkout ones for all of them. Some kind of... Basket? Grocery bag? Box?"

[The King of the Undead]

2 minutes ago, suicidalfranco said:

Meanwhile at Epic: "guys we need to find a way that allows people to buy more than one game at a time. Some kind of digital container where people can add stuff to it as they scroll through the items and have to checkout ones for all of them. Some kind of... Basket? Grocery bag? Box?"

I got it a colander!

[suicidalfranco]

1 minute ago, will4623 said:

I got it a colander!

Hire this man! He's on to something

[The King of the Undead]

3 minutes ago, suicidalfranco said:

Hire this man! He's on to something

we could ban people for spending over 5 dollars on games instead of 5 games! why half it lets kill our store!

[BuckGup]

Sweet now someone make the AdobeCC work

[Guest]

2 hours ago, suicidalfranco said:

Meanwhile at Epic: "guys we need to find a way that allows people to buy more than one game at a time. Some kind of digital container where people can add stuff to it as they scroll through the items and have to checkout ones for all of them. Some kind of... Basket? Grocery bag? Box?"

Epic CEO the type of guy to always go for the basket at the supermarket and then overfill it. 

[bcredeur97]

9 hours ago, williamcll said:

Nice, what is the best linux for games right now?

I find myself really wanting to switch to Linux because I could reasonably rely on a VM with gpu passthrough for games if Proton doens't serve me well enough. And I really like Linux... I use it at work so much and I'm always like "man.. if I could do this on windows..." or "wow this is much more efficient why can't windows have something like this?"

I just haven't been able to bring myself to do it though...

[ryao]

17 hours ago, suicidalfranco said:

Meanwhile at Epic: "guys we need to find a way that allows people to buy more than one game at a time. Some kind of digital container where people can add stuff to it as they scroll through the items and have to checkout ones for all of them. Some kind of... Basket? Grocery bag? Box?"

That comment ended up derailing the thread into one about Epic, but since you started it, here is the most epic way that I have of adding to it:

 

https://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2019/08/26/here-comes-a-new-challenger

[xAcid9]

Is there anyway to use proton as standalone thingy or as a wrapper to existing game files from windoze? 

[ryao]

1 hour ago, xAcid9 said:

Is there anyway to use proton as standalone thingy or as a wrapper to existing game files from windoze? 

Not at the moment, but the dxgi, d3d9, d3d10 and d3d11 DLLs from Proton can be used on Windows by dropping them into the directory with the game executable. The game will almost always use them in place of the Microsoft ones if you do that. The d3d10 and d3d11 DLLs probably need the corresponding dxgi DLL. Also, you need to grab the right version depending on whether the grand is 32-bit or 64-bit to do that.

 

There might be other DLLs that can be reused, but most DLLs in proton are shims that load Linux ELF library versions. They are in the process of switching to native Windows DLLs, but that just started. For now, the only components that I am certain can be reused are D9VK, DXVK and WineD3D.

 

WineD3D does Direct3D 1-11 to OpenGL. It’s Direct3D 10 and 11 support are less complete than DXVK, which does Direct3D 10 and 11 to Vulkan. D9VK is a fork of DXVK that adds Direct3D 9 to Vulkan. Translation to Vulkan generally gives higher FPS than translation to OpenGL. With only a few exceptions, DXVK is not faster than the native Direct3D 10/11 code on Nvidia hardware. It tends to be far more competitive on AMD graphics hardware. D9VK is more mixed on Nvidia hardware. Windows 10 1607 slowed down direct3d 9 games like CS:GO on Windows, so it is easier for D9VK to outperform it, but it does not always do that. I do not have access to very much dats on this. I am told that D9VK runs circles around the stock Windows code on AMD hardware.

[JoeCoke]

Very happy to hear about this progress. Linux already could play every game I play (and well) earlier this year when I tested it, so this makes the deal even sweeter. Only issue is Adobe Premiere and Game Maker, but I'm gonna experiment with running a Windows VM with a dedicated GPU, and if that goes smoothly I'll just do that. The Windows 7 ride is coming to an end, and I won't be switching to 10.

[ryao]

7 minutes ago, 2Buck said:

Very happy to hear about this progress. Linux already could play every game I play (and well) earlier this year when I tested it, so this makes the deal even sweeter. Only issue is Adobe Premiere and Game Maker, but I'm gonna experiment with running a Windows VM with a dedicated GPU, and if that goes smoothly I'll just do that. The Windows 7 ride is coming to an end, and I won't be switching to 10.

No one has tested gamemaker in a while:

 

https://www.protondb.com/app/585410

 

Howeverm the issue is related to .NET:

 

https://github.com/ValveSoftware/Proton/issues/18

 

That was identified as being related to issue #18, which has since been fixed. It might work now.

 

As for Adobe Premiere, most people on Linux are using DaVinci Resolve. It would be suboptimal, but you could use Adobe Premiere inside a Windows VM. Alternatively, Adobe Premiere CS3 is said to work in Wine with workarounds:

 

https://appdb.winehq.org/objectManager.php?sClass=version&iId=10023

[JoeCoke]

10 minutes ago, ryao said:

No one has tested gamemaker in a while:

 

https://www.protondb.com/app/585410

 

Howeverm the issue is related to .NET:

 

https://github.com/ValveSoftware/Proton/issues/18

 

That was identified as being related to issue #18, which has since been fixed. It might work now.

 

As for Adobe Premiere, most people on Linux are using DaVinci Resolve. It would be suboptimal, but you could use Adobe Premiere inside a Windows VM. Alternatively, Adobe Premiere CS3 is said to work in Wine with workarounds:

 

https://appdb.winehq.org/objectManager.php?sClass=version&iId=10023

Yeah I'm fine with running a Windows 7 VM, it'll make the transition smoother I feel.

[ryao]

14 minutes ago, 2Buck said:

Yeah I'm fine with running a Windows 7 VM, it'll make the transition smoother I feel.

I did some more research. Last year, people had Adobe Premiere 2014 working in Wine:

 

It says that the 2015 version was missing text. It might work now. Anyway, that tackles at least one of your problems.

 

By the way, the video acceleration is likely only working under the staging version of Wine. Be sure to use that.

[sof006]

This is impressive and now that Destiny is moving to Steam even more reason to switch.

[ryao]

9 hours ago, sof006 said:

This is impressive and now that Destiny is moving to Steam even more reason to switch.

It is unclear if Destiny 2 will work when on Steam. It presently does not work in Wine due to its anticheat. A valve employee had been asking questions on the VKx discord server about installing destiny 2 in Wine from battle.net so they are probably working on it.