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.
This time Feral wins; fps at start of the very first mission are 56 for native version, and only 38..39 for wine/DXVK
Quoting: kokoko3kJust tested Hitman 2016.
This time Feral wins; fps at start of the very first mission are 56 for native version, and only 38..39 for wine/DXVK
What card are you using? You profile only lists "Nvidia", but not the model. I got so-so performance on (native) Hitman on my old GTX 670 (roughly equivalent to a GTX1060), to the point that I gave up playing it.
I have a 1080 now and really should try getting into this again.
Quoting: scaineWhat card are you using? You profile only lists "Nvidia", but not the model. I got so-so performance on (native) Hitman on my old GTX 670 (roughly equivalent to a GTX1060), to the point that I gave up playing it.Wrote in the post about grid autosport:
I have a 1080 now and really should try getting into this again.
Quoting: kokoko3kCPU:Intel(R) Core(TM) i5-4590 CPU @ 3.30GHz
GPU:GeForce GTX 750 Ti 2GB
RAM:16GB
Anyhow, the settings i tested it were quite low, i don't play hitman due to performance reasons too.
-EDIT-
Are you sure gtx1060 is equivalent to gtx670? In benchmark it seems gtx1060 is on par with gtx980 (non ti).
Last edited by kokoko3k on 17 September 2018 at 3:52 pm UTC
Quoting: XpanderGTA 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
Is there anything special I need to do to get GTA V to work with Steam Play? It doesn't have great rating at the SPCR website. I have a GTX 1060 6GB card with Intel 2500K and 24GB RAM. I don't want to download such a big game to find out that it doesn't work. I am only interested in the Single player.
Quoting: baccilusQuoting: XpanderGTA 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
Is there anything special I need to do to get GTA V to work with Steam Play? It doesn't have great rating at the SPCR website. I have a GTX 1060 6GB card with Intel 2500K and 24GB RAM. I don't want to download such a big game to find out that it doesn't work. I am only interested in the Single player.
It works but takes some tinkering. You need ms fonts (either in your distro or in wine/proton through winetricks), a special dxvk config option and set msdmo to builtin (with winecfg).
https://github.com/ValveSoftware/Proton/issues/37#issuecomment-420495098
I'm about 30% through the game, plays great. You can get by without the msdmo fix for single player but you have to pass on offline only option to the game or the social club hangs.
Quoting: GuestQuoting: FredOQuoting: 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.
i had to sell mine needed the money,thankfully i had a 970 laying around.
A few years back we had three Nvidia's in a row that died within 3 years. Two got replaced once under warranty so it was really 5. One other had a fan go out, that I replaced myself. I almost swore off Nvidia all together, but the next ones were good. I've got a 465 running that is about 5 years old and my 980 is I think a little over 3.
Patreon
PayPal
See more from me