As we speculated previously, Valve have now officially announced their new version of 'Steam Play' for Linux gaming using a modified distribution of Wine called Proton, which is available on GitHub.
What does it do? In short: it allows you to play Windows games on Linux, directly through the Steam client as if they were a Linux game.
What many people suspected turned out to be true, DXVK development was actually funded by Valve. They actually employed the DXVK developer since February 2018. On top of that, they also helped to fund: vkd3d (Direct3D 12 implementation based on Vulkan), OpenVR and Steamworks native API bridges, wined3d performance and functionality fixes for Direct3D 9 and Direct3D 11 and more.
The amount of work that has gone into this—it's ridiculous.
Here's what they say it improves:
- Windows games with no Linux version currently available can now be installed and run directly from the Linux Steam client, complete with native Steamworks and OpenVR support.
- DirectX 11 and 12 implementations are now based on Vulkan, resulting in improved game compatibility and reduced performance impact.
- Fullscreen support has been improved: fullscreen games will be seamlessly stretched to the desired display without interfering with the native monitor resolution or requiring the use of a virtual desktop.
- Improved game controller support: games will automatically recognize all controllers supported by Steam. Expect more out-of-the-box controller compatibility than even the original version of the game.
- Performance for multi-threaded games has been greatly improved compared to vanilla Wine.
It currently has a limited set of games that are supported, but even so it's quite an impressive list that they're putting out there. Which includes DOOM, FINAL FANTASY VI, Into The Breach, NieR: Automata, S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Shadow of Chernobyl, Star Wars: Battlefront 2 and more. They will enable many more titles as progress on it all continues.
To be clear, this is available right now. To get it, you need to be in the Steam Client Beta.
There will be drawbacks, like possible performance issues and games that rely on some DRM might likely never be supported, but even so the amount of possibilities this opens up has literally split my head open with Thor's mighty hammer.
Holy shit. Please excuse the language, but honestly, I'm physically shaking right now I don't quite know how to process this.
Update #1: I spoke to Valve earlier, about how buying Windows games to play with this system counts, they said this:
Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.Hey Liam, the normal algorithm is in effect, so if at the end of the two weeks you have more playtime on Linux, it'll be a Linux sale. Proton counts as Linux.
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Quoting: GuestQuoting: mrdeathjrQuoting: GuestHow is Tekken 7 running for you guys? For me it has pretty bad performance which is a shame for a fighting game, sits around 40-50fps most of the time, and I don't think I'm hardware bound because gpu and cpu usage still seem low and lowering settings does nothing either
Funny enough though, Killer Instinct (Which I think is a better fighting game anyway) fully works maxed out at 1080p using Proton, and its not even on the short list of games they're providing support for like Tekken 7 is.. And even more so, it's published by Microsoft and no doubt VERY heavily built on DirectX
Yet Tekken 7 uses Unreal Engine 4, also tried Snake Pass another UE4 game and performance seemed worse then last time I tried it using Lutris+DXVK and Wine, same goes for Grip which also ran fine using standard wine and DXVK... Yet on Proton it literally was going down to 6fps in-game
Seem to be having some bad luck with UE4 games so far, which I find surprising
Edit: Tested various other games as well, including Super Bomberman R (which seems to work flawlessly from the short time I spent on it).. Crash Bandicoot N.Sane Trilogy sadly crashes after I press A on the "Press A to continue" screen, Quake Champions crashes straight after the initial screen, Resident Evil REmake just shows black screen (expected this one due to lack of WMP9 which is required in winetricks for it to work properly)... Duck Game doesn't load and just insta-crashes (again expected, as Duck Game requires XNA which can be installed using winetricks in normal wine)
Plan on doing alot more testing.. But more importantly I hope mrdeathdj is doing some testing of his own xD
Hi
I try testing tekken 7 but is so expensive* (dont have enough money)
*Normally bandai namco - tecmo koei is expensive games
^_^
Yes and I didn't want to buy it as well for the fact it used denuvo and was cracked in 24 hours, the director of Tekken 7 even said some performance problems for windows users were due to issues with some of the anti-tamper they were using, I don't think the specific tweet mentioned denuvo and could be more in-house but generally didn't sit too well with me... Plus the fact I actually tried Tekken 7 anyway and lol tbh it's not overly that good of a tekken game in my opinion, arcade mode is utter crap, that "rage mode" thing is utter crap
But eh, I'm a big fighting game fan and sadly linux has no triple A fighting games, I was gritting my teeth buying Tekken 7 yesturday but with it being on the list of games I really wanted my tekken fix lol, but playing a fighting game under 60fps is just not a fun experience for me
I'll be sticking with Killer Instinct for now, Valve need to add that game to their list because it already works perfectly fine using Steamplay, as do quite alot of other unlisted games from what a few steam friends have said :)
From what I understand as well, Valve did say people who are into open source projects can upload their own versions of proton? so in the long-term we'll have a lot of custom-settings for various different games to make them run right
I'll be testing Dead Rising 2 next, I noticed you've already tested that game but for me the performance was too heavy, not just that the FPS was very low but very inconsistent and jumping around causing a lot of stuttering
After Dead Rising 2 I'll probably test street fighter IV next.
I'm making a big wall of text now but I'm overwhelmed with this news from Valve, their efforts towards linux gaming is exciting ^^
Yeah dead rising 2 works on steam play however this game needs csmt and very high single thread
In my case use PROTON_NO_ESYNC=1 %command% for most games, in my case esync dont affect because my cpu have a few cores without forget is monolothic cpu compared with modular cpus case ryzen
^_^
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legluondunet Aug 24, 2018
Tekken 7 is on the Steamplay whitelist and it doesn't launch with Proton...Valve should verify his Whitelist before to publish it.
https://steamcommunity.com/games/221410/announcements/detail/1696055855739350561
https://github.com/ValveSoftware/Proton/issues/278
https://steamcommunity.com/games/221410/announcements/detail/1696055855739350561
https://github.com/ValveSoftware/Proton/issues/278
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Quoting: legluondunetTekken 7 is on the Steamplay whitelist and it doesn't launch with Proton...Valve should verify his Whitelist before to publish it.
https://steamcommunity.com/games/221410/announcements/detail/1696055855739350561
https://github.com/ValveSoftware/Proton/issues/278
I suppose this is going to be a pretty big problem for the Proton future. Wine has always been pretty sensitive to details, so even though stuff works on one machine gives no guarantee for the rest.
Even updating Wine may break stuff that was whitelisted earlier. This may prove to be quite a bit of work.
Last edited by Ehvis on 24 August 2018 at 8:50 pm UTC
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Quoting: legluondunetTekken 7 is on the Steamplay whitelist and it doesn't launch with Proton...Valve should verify his Whitelist before to publish it.That's why it's only available in the beta client. They're still figuring this out.
https://steamcommunity.com/games/221410/announcements/detail/1696055855739350561
https://github.com/ValveSoftware/Proton/issues/278
1 Likes, Who?
I just played an evening GTA5 with Steam play, knowing that the 30 euros will be recognized as Linux purchase. GTA5 runs perfectly well on my machine, all settings maxed out. Magic times...
PS: I took me an evening too to get it to run. The launcher has some problems with fonts due to missing corefonts, but the biggest issue were startup crashes. Fortunately I found https://github.com/ValveSoftware/Proton/issues/37#issuecomment-415833819 which was exactly my solution.
PPS: I don't care at all about multiplayer/online, haven't tried that. I'm only in for the single player story, which seems exactly my taste from what I have seen.
Last edited by jens on 2 September 2018 at 6:18 pm UTC
PS: I took me an evening too to get it to run. The launcher has some problems with fonts due to missing corefonts, but the biggest issue were startup crashes. Fortunately I found https://github.com/ValveSoftware/Proton/issues/37#issuecomment-415833819 which was exactly my solution.
PPS: I don't care at all about multiplayer/online, haven't tried that. I'm only in for the single player story, which seems exactly my taste from what I have seen.
Last edited by jens on 2 September 2018 at 6:18 pm UTC
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Quoting: lobstertcIt takes 5-6 seconds to launch, and then pops up a dialog saying something about not recognising my graphics card. I click "OK", and the game runs.Quoting: PieOrCakeCrysis 2 Maximum Edition: Some intial mucking about with resolution and windowed/fullscreen, but got it working well.
How did Crysis launched for you? I can't even see any signs of it launched except the words saying launching on steam and then again I can press play.
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I'm not sure if anyone has said this yet, but the original Borderlands seems to work great.
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Quoting: jarhead_hRWBY: Grim Eclipse(installs, boots, runs, doesn't display character models in game making it unplayable)
Have you tried forcing DX9 ?
-force-d3d9 - just pass it as a run parameter.
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Quoting: legluondunetTekken 7 is on the Steamplay whitelist and it doesn't launch with Proton...Valve should verify his Whitelist before to publish it.
https://steamcommunity.com/games/221410/announcements/detail/1696055855739350561
https://github.com/ValveSoftware/Proton/issues/278
Being on the whitelist it doesn't mean it's bug free. Luckily I'd say (or there would be less job for us devs in general).
It simply means it is supported. You open a ticket to valve and they will surely look in to it. With games that are not in the whitelist instead they take no accountability: if they help it's good for you, if they don't you have deal with it since they never made promises (which doesn't mean they don't care, just they can't help if you on your own decided to spend money on it and in the end it doesn't work).
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Cyba.Cowboy Aug 26, 2018
QuoteWindows games with no Linux version currently available can now be installed and run directly from the Linux Steam client, complete with native Steamworks and OpenVR support.
So how does this work?
Is it in reference to Microsoft Windows-based games bought through Steam, or can I run any old .exe file and Steam will setup it up via WINE for me?
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