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It seems NVIDIA have been working on some improvements to their Linux driver, as the 396.54.05 beta driver seems to have improved performance in various games.

Tweeting about it, Valve's Pierre-Loup Griffais said "Proton NVIDIA users: the latest 396.54.05 Vulkan Beta driver contains significant performance improvements in GPU-bound scenarios.". He also noted that those on Ubuntu can grab it from a different PPA provided by Canonical for easy installation.

Looking around, it seems he's right on the money. Talking about it in our forum (also reddit), users noted improvements to games run on Linux. The improvements look pretty impressive too. The focus of everyone's testing seems to be DXVK which benefits from the new driver, so I went to test.

I was going to try out DOOM this morning, to see if there were any improvements there myself, but sadly the latest Proton update has actually made it unplayable for me when using two monitors (issue report). A shame, because it was basically perfection on the initial release of Proton from Valve's Steam Play. A good case for not simply moving everyone onto the latest version, keeping older versions around for when they do work fine. Edit: As mentioned in our comments, DOOM is not a good test case anyway, I simply don't own enough Windows games currently to test such stuff, but I'm working on acquiring more for such testing.

Instead, I took a look at Rise of the Tomb Raider and F1 2017 two native Linux games with Vulkan but it gave practically no difference. Edit: As mentioned by the DXVK developer in our first comments, the driver update will mainly benefit DXVK (for now) anyway.

So for those of you who are playing games (when they work) with Steam Play, this driver should hopefully improve things for you.

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YoRHa-2B 16 Sep 2018
What they improved in the driver is apparently reporting whether a resource should be created with a dedicated allocation or not, which is necessary on Nvidia hardware to enable things like compression on render targets. DXVK heavily relies on the driver giving correct hints, whereas other native games might not, and DOOM probably doesn't even use the extension because the game is so old.
danniello 16 Sep 2018
DOOM is not using DXVK because it is Vulkan native game (as option, by default it is using OpenGL), so probably in this case there is no improvement at all.
Liam Dawe 16 Sep 2018
What they improved in the driver is apparently reporting whether a resource should be created with a dedicated allocation or not, which is necessary on Nvidia hardware to enable things like compression on render targets. DXVK heavily relies on the driver giving correct hints, whereas other native games might not, and DOOM probably doesn't even use the extension because the game is so old.
Thanks for the insight, interesting to know :)

I guess in future I will need to pick up a few extra games for DXVK/Steam Play testing, when we figure out the issue with DOOM anyway.

DOOM is not using DXVK because it is Vulkan native game (as option, by default it is using OpenGL), so probably in this case there is no improvement at all.
It's still a Vulkan game and simply one I was going to test, NVIDIA didn't mention in the notes it would mainly help DXVK as the author has pointed out in the comments.


Last edited by Liam Dawe on 16 Sep 2018 at 11:23 am UTC
goldenk 16 Sep 2018
I have no comparison as I'm a new proton user but my 8700k and 1080ti with the latest driver run Doom, dark souls 3 and wolfenstein: the new order at or just about at windows performance. I had one issue but got it cleared up.
Xpander 16 Sep 2018
What they improved in the driver is apparently reporting whether a resource should be created with a dedicated allocation or not, which is necessary on Nvidia hardware to enable things like compression on render targets. DXVK heavily relies on the driver giving correct hints, whereas other native games might not, and DOOM probably doesn't even use the extension because the game is so old.
Thanks for the insight, interesting to know :)

I guess in future I will need to pick up a few extra games for DXVK/Steam Play testing, when we figure out the issue with DOOM anyway.

DOOM is not using DXVK because it is Vulkan native game (as option, by default it is using OpenGL), so probably in this case there is no improvement at all.
It's still a Vulkan game and simply one I was going to test, NVIDIA didn't mention in the notes it would mainly help DXVK as the author has pointed out in the comments.

DOOM has zero perf improvements with 396.54.05 over the regular 396.54. As already said its using much older vulkan version.

GTA V on the other hand went from 70-90fps to 90-110FPS in the GPU bound situations (which are the most situations for me with 2560x1440) and the GPU utilization is now a bit lower also, around 90% while it was constantly 100% before
Liam Dawe 16 Sep 2018
DOOM has zero perf improvements with 396.54.05 over the regular 396.54. As already said its using much older vulkan version.
Alright I get it, DOOM is not a good test case ;)
scaine 16 Sep 2018
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The Doom bug affected me as well - an 800x600 full screen "window" on the wrong monitor. However, if you can navigate into Campaign, then Settings, Video, you can change the monitor and then hit escape to apply the change. Game works fine for me now, and it remembers the change thereafter too.

I hope this doesn't happen every time a new version of Proton comes out though!
Liam Dawe 16 Sep 2018
The Doom bug affected me as well - an 800x600 full screen "window" on the wrong monitor. However, if you can navigate into Campaign, then Settings, Video, you can change the monitor and then hit escape to apply the change. Game works fine for me now, and it remembers the change thereafter too.

I hope this doesn't happen every time a new version of Proton comes out though!
I couldn't even do that. I tried the brute force reinstall method which works, so Valve now have a log where it had the issue and a log where it works fine. Hopefully that might help them track the issue down.

As you said, I sincerely hope this is something that gets ironed out because it's going to be a repeating issue I fear and something that will put people off if they have more than one monitor.
Xpander 16 Sep 2018
No issue for me with DOOM on a multi-monitor setup. Have 2x 2560x1440 monitors, MATE Desktop. All is like it was with previous proton builds


Last edited by Xpander on 16 Sep 2018 at 12:23 pm UTC
Faattori 16 Sep 2018
If someone has it Wolfenstein II: The New Colossus might be a good game to test if the new drivers would offer an increase without DXVK. It's much newer than DOOM (2016).


Last edited by Faattori on 16 Sep 2018 at 12:39 pm UTC
massatt212 16 Sep 2018
can some one install TEKKEN 7 and tell me if their were any improvements
rkfg 16 Sep 2018
Tested it with GTA V, no visible improvement either. Maybe it's more CPU bound then.
Kristian 16 Sep 2018
I hope this doesn't happen every time a new version of Proton comes out though!
It's not a new version though, it's a new Beta.
It seems everyone is (almost) forgetting that.

Isn't it actually only the Nvidia driver that has been updated? So this isn't a Proton update at all, beta or otherwise?
FredO 16 Sep 2018
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KxgACrsM-Yo&t=511s

i tested this on the older drivers but will test again on the new drivers.only downside is i have a gtx 970,i no longer have a 980ti.

What happened to your 980ti? My one literally went up in smoke after just 3 years of use. Very disappointing.
Liam Dawe 16 Sep 2018
I hope this doesn't happen every time a new version of Proton comes out though!
It's not a new version though, it's a new Beta.
It seems everyone is (almost) forgetting that.
Well, all the changes from the Proton beta were pushed to the main Proton branch (the default), so I wouldn't expect this kind of issue to happen.
mao_dze_dun 16 Sep 2018
Perhaps one needs the latest DXVK to ensure the best possible results. I do tend to replace the Proton DXVK files with the latest version. I'm kind of busy these days but I'll try to do some native vs dxvk benchmarks some time next week.
He also noted that those on Ubuntu can grab it from a different PPA provided by Canonical for easy installation.
Just because it wasn't clear to me, this link is the dev channel of the "usual" graphics drivers ppa. Presumably, once they feel the driver is stable enough, it will make it into the main ppa for those of us who don't want to be quite that far on the bleeding edge.

Here is the stable ppa, in case anyone hasn't found it yet:
https://launchpad.net/~graphics-drivers/+archive/ubuntu/ppa
mao_dze_dun 16 Sep 2018
I haven't experienced any FPS boost with the witcher3.

What are your specs? From what I understand the boost is for GPU limited situations. Maybe your CPU is maxed out.
paffLeChien 16 Sep 2018
Hello everybody,

I also tried the beta driver and only noticed a change into Dark Souls III. I tested on the first area and into the last DLC, i only had to turn lower the shadow details (all others details at the max ) to have a smooth 60fps . I previously was on the last 396 stable driver.

Unfortunately i did not notice anything on Tekken 7 or Nier automata :/.
I'm around 35 - 45 fps on Nier Automata after the tutorial sequence :/.

My config :
OS : Ubuntu 18.04.1
Graphic Card : MSI GTX 970 4G
kernel : 4.15.0-35-generic
Proc : intel core i5-2500k@4ghz
Desktop : Gnome 3.28.2 - X11
kokoko3k 17 Sep 2018
Today i did some tests with Grid autosports, with native(feral), dxvk 0.72+nvidia-396.54 and dxvk+nvidia-396.54.05
In the tests, gpu was always at 90/100%, so there are huge improvements, very huge.

CPU:Intel(R) Core(TM) i5-4590 CPU @ 3.30GHz
GPU:GeForce GTX 750 Ti 2GB
RAM:16GB
.
 --------------------------------------------------
 1280x1024, Quality:High, $4XMSAA
 --------------------------------------------------
 ____________Native___396.54___396.54.05 
 Start Line: 62. . . .56. . . .65
 Avg. . . .: 73. . . .61. . . .78
 Min. . . .: 54. . . .51. . . .61
 Max. . . .: 96. . . .73. . . .99
.
.
--------------------------------------------------
1280x1024, Quality:Ultra, $4XMSAA
--------------------------------------------------
 ____________Native___396.54___396.54.05 
 Start Line: 45. . . .33. . . .50
 Avg. . . .: 50. . . .36. . . .55
 Min. . . .: 43. . . .32. . . .47
 Max. . . .: 65. . . .41. . . .73 



Yes, actually, DXVK+wine performs better than native feral version:
9 to 12% better on ultra, 3 to 12% better on high.
The only downside is a periodic/irritating "POP" in the audio.

Have said that, Grid autosport was one of the first Feral Ports, and performance weren't too great vs the windows version, (we speak of a performance (drops betweeb 40% and 20%)

-EDIT-
Spaces are not retained in the final post, even if in the preview it looks fine. I've had to replace spaces with dots, sorry.


Last edited by kokoko3k on 17 Sep 2018 at 1:24 pm UTC
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