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.
Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.
Quoting: GuestQuoting: scaineI 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?
Quoting: Guesthttps://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.
Quoting: GuestWell, 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.Quoting: scaineI 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.
no_information_here Sep 16, 2018
QuoteHe 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
Quoting: GuestI 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.
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
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 September 2018 at 1:24 pm UTC
Patreon
PayPal
See more from me