The Steam Play whitelist just had a large update including The Witness and Wolfenstein: The Old Blood

Running a 396-series driver isn't a bad idea for Feral's ports either, they basically replaced the entire shader compiler. Might give a performance boost here and there.

And for DXVK it's a hard requirement.

I'm kind of in the same boat. I'm on Mint, but it's only offering me 340.107 and 390.48 so I'd rather stick to that. Didn't someone say that the newer drivers were only necessary for Vulkan games anyway, or something along those lines?

Once you're using Steamplay Proton or Wine/DXVK though, then even non Vulkan games are having their DirectX calls converted to Vulkan. As far as the display driver is concerned, games having API translation done are all Vulkan games. Running the later drivers ensures you have a more robust and bugfixed interface accepting the Vulkan calls.


Last edited by x4mer on 7 Oct 2018 at 7:03 pm UTC

I'm a long term Debian user, and I use it properly... i.e. I install the packages from the regular repositories so that my system doesn't get messed up. I have tried backports and all sorts of things in the past, but generally find that forcing a later graphics driver onto the system ends up borking it.

I'm kind of in the same boat. I'm on Mint, but it's only offering me 340.107 and 390.48 so I'd rather stick to that. Didn't someone say that the newer drivers were only necessary for Vulkan games anyway, or something along those lines?

On Mint or Ubuntu there's no good reason not to use the semi-official graphics drivers PPA maintained by Ubuntu staff. There's also the development PPA for beta drivers with more up-to-date Vulkan support. Valve officially recommends the former in their Proton prerequisites document.

So in other words, if you're not a Sam & Max fan, it's actually a pretty small list.

Strange, considering there's apparently a lot more games which have complete "platinum" results... I would have thought that many of those would be added to the "whitelist" in the next update.

I think it's obvious that they are not whitelisting just because someone somewhere says it's good enough. SPCR list has its limits, often not fully tested and it's opinion-based rather than factual. Valve is most likely doing proper QA on their own and it takes time.

Very likely. For example, I just played through Alan Wake again. It was getting Platinum ratings. I tried it, and while it worked there were pretty noticeable problems. It likes to crash. Enabling any AA at all turned the grass into blocks. There were constant graphical glitches. I finished the game, and The Signal tack-on episodes, and as much as I like the game there's no way it should be white-listed. White-listing should be reserved purely for games that "just-work" on the majority of major distros like Ubuntu, Fedora, Manjaro, etc, without any need for special launch options or non-working graphical features.

I'm a long term Debian user, and I use it properly... i.e. I install the packages from the regular repositories so that my system doesn't get messed up. I have tried backports and all sorts of things in the past, but generally find that forcing a later graphics driver onto the system ends up borking it.

I'm kind of in the same boat. I'm on Mint, but it's only offering me 340.107 and 390.48 so I'd rather stick to that. Didn't someone say that the newer drivers were only necessary for Vulkan games anyway, or something along those lines?

I'm on Fedora 28, and I really think that has helped me in this case because it's a royal pain to set up Fedora for proprietary drivers, and those are the only drivers worth using with a newer NVIDIA card.

https://www.if-not-true-then-false.com/2015/fedora-nvidia-guide/

I'm running 396.54.06, pretty much just because why not? This guide only has to be followed once. Once you've blacklisted and removed Noveau changing to newer NVIDIA drivers is easy. You really should be familiar with VIM to do so, though. I don't know how this translates to a debian based distro like Mint or Ubuntu because I know that they both handle graphics drivers in the gui.

Recommend this : https://www.openvim.com/


Last edited by jarhead_h on 7 Oct 2018 at 8:08 pm UTC

I'm a long term Debian user, and I use it properly... i.e. I install the packages from the regular repositories so that my system doesn't get messed up. I have tried backports and all sorts of things in the past, but generally find that forcing a later graphics driver onto the system ends up borking it.

I'm kind of in the same boat. I'm on Mint, but it's only offering me 340.107 and 390.48 so I'd rather stick to that. Didn't someone say that the newer drivers were only necessary for Vulkan games anyway, or something along those lines?

I'm on Mint too but i'm using 396.54.05. Didn't cause me so much trouble.

New drivers are needed for DXVK's sake in general which also affects SteamPlay.

Just add graphics ppa and you're ready to install driver via gui.

Is there a second official Steam Whitelist somewhere besides the original one? Or are they just not bothering to update their whitelist. I mean, it's nice that they linked the steamdb changes, but why wouldn't they update their own list proper and just use that? Am I missing something?

This niggle aside, it IS good to see evidence that the Steam crew are testing games.

I tried "the old blood" and steel doesn't work on stable mesa drivers, the patch for expose the ARB_vertex_buffer_object in core profile isn't in yet, so why they have whitelisted it?

[quote=jarhead_h][quote=Solitary]

So in other words, if you're not a Sam & Max fan, it's actually a pretty small list.


I'm on Fedora 28, and I really think that has helped me in this case because it's a royal pain to set up Fedora for proprietary drivers, and those are the only drivers worth using with a newer NVIDIA card.

https://www.if-not-true-then-false.com/2015/fedora-nvidia-guide/

I'm running 396.54.06, pretty much just because why not? This guide only has to be followed once. Once you've blacklisted and removed Noveau changing to newer NVIDIA drivers is easy. You really should be familiar with VIM to do so, though. I don't know how this translates to a debian based distro like Mint or Ubuntu because I know that they both handle graphics drivers in the gui.

Recommend this : https://www.openvim.com/

https://negativo17.org/nvidia-driver/

The only recent time I had to compile a Nvidia driver was on a system that with GTX 465. The newest drivers don't support the card, the 340 driver was the only version I could find in the repo. I had to download the 390.87 driver from Nvidia so I could get vulkan support

so...
they ignored our list
https://spcr.netlify.com/needs-testing
and they are going with steamdb list instead?

If it is the case, it is a pity

Question: Does buying them now count as a Linux or Windows sale?
They don't have the Linux icon yet.

They explicitly said it counted as a Linux sale. :)

All I could find was "Steam Play whitelisted games will not be offered for purchase or marked as supported on Linux on the Store during the initial Beta period." in the initial announcement - which to me it only says about the icon's appearance but not whether it counts as a Linux sale or not.

Is there any other place where they discussed about this?

In terms of places you can go look, not sure. What we know is that Liam asked if games played on Proton counted as Linux sales and they told him unequivocally that yes they were and so he reported the news to we lucky GamingOnLinux fans.


Last edited by Purple Library Guy on 8 Oct 2018 at 5:01 pm UTC

It does occur to me that while it's nice that the Whitelist is growing, it's probably adding games slower than new games are being published on Steam . . .

That was to be expected. If Valve don't have the workforce to vet every game that is added to the store in the first place, they certainly won't pay an army to retroactively test everything on even one "standard" Linux configuration. I'll be surprised if we get more than a handful of additions to the list per month. That's why I'm curious to know how they choose which games to vet first, and why I was surprised to see something like Commander Keen there.

Anyone ever had Wolfenstein the old blood running on an amd card. For some reason the game always defaults to openGL and fails because its missing a gl class. Running a rx470 with 18.2.1 mesa.
Be nice if they said what systems these games were whitelisted against.

I mean, it's nice that they linked the steamdb changes, but why wouldn't they update their own list proper and just use that?

You have it backwards - SteamDB is merely reporting changes made in Steam/Valve repositories, it is not a repository in itself. In other words, SteamDb is showing the changes they made to "their own list proper", just in a more convenient format for the general public.

That was to be expected. If Valve don't have the workforce to vet every game that is added to the store in the first place, they certainly won't pay an army to retroactively test everything on even one "standard" Linux configuration. I'll be surprised if we get more than a handful of additions to the list per month. That's why I'm curious to know how they choose which games to vet first, and why I was surprised to see something like Commander Keen there.

THIS. I seriously doubt Valve is expecting immediate returns here. This is a long term project that is really more about planting seeds. If you build it they will come. We've already seen the trend among dual-booters is that they are going to ditch their Windows installs, if not on their current rig, then on their next one. So the dual booters are on board. When that finishes shaking out in the next year or so our marketshare could go from .58% last month to .78% this month to maybe even 2% by end of 2020. By 2025 we are looking at possibly 10%, which is higher than Apple.

Microsoft seems damned determined to do it's best to help out. I mean they are even pushing mandatory system updates that they know will delete random files on a certain percentage of machines. We couldn't ask for more.

So be patient, and be of good cheer. All we need is for Valve to continue at a lazy pace and we'll win.

You have it backwards - SteamDB is merely reporting changes made in Steam/Valve repositories, it is not a repository in itself. In other words, SteamDb is showing the changes they made to "their own list proper", just in a more convenient format for the general public.

But where is Valve showing these changes...?

That was to be expected. If Valve don't have the workforce to vet every game that is added to the store in the first place, they certainly won't pay an army to retroactively test everything on even one "standard" Linux configuration. I'll be surprised if we get more than a handful of additions to the list per month. That's why I'm curious to know how they choose which games to vet first, and why I was surprised to see something like Commander Keen there.

THIS. I seriously doubt Valve is expecting immediate returns here.

I actually think they hold back their whitelist announcements as they have to support the games they whitelisted and thatfor they have to manage risks. Testing is awesome, but there will be a certain percentage of users that will have problems and the bigger the audience, the higher the risk. So they pick up a set of games with some really notable candidates and fill it with some niche games to make it an overall compelling package, but they won't just whitelist 20 super asked for AAA games that they fear would attract to many people to handle. The now whitelisted games didn't even all have perfect scores in spcr.
Do people already playing on linux actually care for the whitelist? I have the impression that most people just look at youtube and spcr if they are interested in a game.

I personally guess that they have more then enough resources to test to match their willing rate to release, else they would go out and contract people in the community for it. Lots of people would be willing to agree to a little contract just to get free games and valve can get all the data they need to see if such a tester is trustworthy. Just playtime and trophies are a good hint if a game really runs well, so they don't even need to make anyone explicitly test if enough people played through the game with steamplay and they hear word of mouth.
Proton is build upon some really mature projects, but with many fixes to known problems still in the pipeline. FAudio, latest Vulkan extensions, state caches and latest drivers still need to be rolled out. It will take some time to get needed changes into proton and the distributions and get some good assumptions about support costs and with that, the number of whitelisted titles per month will probably increase over time.
On the one hand they are surely playing the long game, as pushing hard would just be to much risk, but they are still on a run to prepare the ecosystem for the worst. They don't invest for nothing and definatly not to just make 10% of their audience switch OS. They invest money to secure their business and they well know they can't bluff MS a second time like with the steam-machine campaign.


Last edited by const on 8 Oct 2018 at 7:30 pm UTC

so...
they ignored our list
https://spcr.netlify.com/needs-testing
and they are going with steamdb list instead?

If it is the case, it is a pity

Question: Does buying them now count as a Linux or Windows sale?
They don't have the Linux icon yet.

They explicitly said it counted as a Linux sale. :)

All I could find was "Steam Play whitelisted games will not be offered for purchase or marked as supported on Linux on the Store during the initial Beta period." in the initial announcement - which to me it only says about the icon's appearance but not whether it counts as a Linux sale or not.

Is there any other place where they discussed about this?

I want to buy Guacamelle 2, having had loved the first one, but I want to make absolutely sure it counts as a Linux sale (because I still didn't forgive the devs/publishers for what they did with the super-turbo-championship edition)

I couldn't find anything official but I know someone from valve told Liam they counted as Linux sales and he mentioned it in the original announcement article. https://www.gamingonlinux.com/articles/valve-officially-confirm-a-new-version-of-steam-play-which-includes-a-modified-version-of-wine.12400


Last edited by Scoopta on 8 Oct 2018 at 8:51 pm UTC

That was to be expected. If Valve don't have the workforce to vet every game that is added to the store in the first place, they certainly won't pay an army to retroactively test everything on even one "standard" Linux configuration. I'll be surprised if we get more than a handful of additions to the list per month. That's why I'm curious to know how they choose which games to vet first, and why I was surprised to see something like Commander Keen there.

But the thing is, for Proton to be a serious switching incentive and/or a strong asset to future Steam Machine-type things, the whitelist needs to be big. That suggests to me that with the best will in the world, their current process is not adequate to their own purposes (let alone ours). They need to come up with some way to leverage crowdsourcing. And I mean, the energy is clearly there, there's lots of people busily trying to establish lists of games that work or don't--the problem is that the results are not that useful to Valve. But if they could channel that in some way that gave them more usable results, it could at least take care of triage.

Like, say for every Steam user who does the thing they have to do to use non-whitelisted games in Proton, they sent a thing kind of like the hardware survey except it checked for all the Proton requirements like graphics driver version and stuff, and asked permission to use the info for improving Proton and expanding the whitelist. And then they gave those people some easy feedback methods for every game they play in Proton, like a "Does it work?" checkbox and a text entry for problems encountered and maybe a 1-10 slider rating for how well it ran, stuff like that.
Stuff all the info in a database and then they'd be able to set aside data from people with the wrong specs, sort out games that ran well for most people as whitelist candidates, spot patterns in games that ran for some but not others, like where a particular graphics driver was associated with problems and so on. Probably end up well worth the work of setting it up.

Edited to add: Const may be right that they're currently going slow on the whitelist because they're still getting the whole thing solidified. But I'd still say that because there are so many games, and so many players, it would be a good idea for them to come up with some way to outsource a lot of testing to those players.


Last edited by Purple Library Guy on 8 Oct 2018 at 9:16 pm UTC

While I agree that a bigger list makes it more attractive, if Valve need to provide support themselves for any title they endorse through Proton, I understand that they want to be damn sure a game works before they add it. As for crowdsourcing, your post got me to think that they do already have some data points that they can leverage to guide their picks of which games to consider endorsing next: they know who plays what through Proton and for how long. Even without looking at SPCR's list themselves, they could very well see those numbers and think that if thousands of people have been playing a given game through Proton consistenly for the past 2 weeks for more than a few minutes at a time, that game is probably at least playable on a number of configurations. And those that get the most playtime are likely to be the most attractive to prospective Linux converts and therefore warrant the exposure and commitment of the whitelist.

(That said, I still can't imagine that something like that led to Commander Keen making it onto the list at this stage :P )

praise Lord Gaben!