Another exciting set of changes for Valve's new Steam Play system. This time the Proton beta 3.16-4 includes some really good stuff. If you don't see it show up, restart Steam.
Here's what's changed:
- Proton now ships with corefonts support. This should fix many games with missing text, or that crash due to missing font support.
- Significant Steamworks compatibility improvements. This should fix SOULCALIBUR VI's network failure when launched through Steam Play.
- For Direct3D games (both DXVK and wined3d), Nvidia cards are now reported as if they are actually AMD cards. This prevents games from trying to load the Windows-only nvapi library and crashing or giving very bad performance.
- Mouse focus and clipping improvements.
- Upgrade OpenVR SDK support.
- Fix for a keyboard input issue in S.T.A.L.K.E.R. games.
See the full changelog here, as a reminder the changelog moved from a file in the repo to GitHub's Wiki system.
It's really great to see the Steamworks fix which caused some issues for people. Hopefully there won't be too many hidden gotchas like that buried in it but only time will tell as more people try out Steam Play. I was also hoping Valve would do something about corefonts, since it was an issue in quite a number of games and a barrier for seamless play. For corefonts, they're not using the actual MSFT fonts, instead they're using liberation-fonts as seen from this commit.
As a reminder, Steam Play needs a driver version of 396.54 or newer at a minimum for NVIDIA and AMD ideally Mesa 18.2. For Transform Feedback support from DXVK you need the 396.54.09 Vulkan Beta Driver on NVIDIA and Mesa git for AMD, this fixes missing models in a bunch of DX11 games.
What I'm looking forward to now are Valve finding a way to deal with all those zero-byte updates and seeing how they advertise Steam Play on store pages. On top of that, what I'm also curious about is how Valve will move forwards with updates to their whitelist, it would be interesting if they had a way to notify you if a game on your wishlist gained "official" Steam Play support.
If you have issues with games not working correctly with Steam Play, do ensure you make a bug report on GitHub to help Valve and co improve the system.
Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.
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The comments on this article are closed.
Quoting: ShmerlQuoting: ScooptaQuoting: loggeHaha, now Nvidia gets their parts of being closed-source only! What a day!I'm not sure what exactly you were trying to say but it sounds sort of like a dig on Nvidia yet you have an nvidia card?
Nvidia cards are reported as AMD cards now, so Nvidia usage will plummet in Steam stats. Thanks to Nvidia pushing their lock-in APIs.
Inside DXVK only. Steam stats are gathered by steam client, so it will get non-spoofed information.
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Quoting: MerpDo you guys use the betas? Just wondering if it's worth switching from the stable version.Sure, I'm using it all the time and at least in my case it works better than the "stable". E.g. GTA5 only works with the newer version of Proton on my system.
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Quoting: officernice@liamdawe Have you heard anything new regarding 64-bit support for Steam? Sorry to derail the train, it just popped into my head! :)Nope!
Quoting: dreamer_I think they mean for games, which likely will see it as AMD like Unity games sending data.Quoting: ShmerlQuoting: ScooptaQuoting: loggeHaha, now Nvidia gets their parts of being closed-source only! What a day!I'm not sure what exactly you were trying to say but it sounds sort of like a dig on Nvidia yet you have an nvidia card?
Nvidia cards are reported as AMD cards now, so Nvidia usage will plummet in Steam stats. Thanks to Nvidia pushing their lock-in APIs.
Inside DXVK only. Steam stats are gathered by steam client, so it will get non-spoofed information.
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Great to see that nvidia GPUs are faked to AMD for games. This was causing lots of framerate issues on nvidia cards because UE4 games and some more called nvapi.dll when nvidia card was present and it just kept spamming it making performance go shit. Always had to manually fake the GPU.
DXVK_HUD still reports nvidia GPU though, so its all fine :)
DXVK_HUD still reports nvidia GPU though, so its all fine :)
1 Likes, Who?
Quoting: loggeHaha, now Nvidia gets their parts of being closed-source only! What a day!Nah, it's not that simple. There are reasons why Nvapi (and AMD's equally closed-source equivalent, AGS) exist, and that is that the public D3D API, unlike OpenGL or Vulkan, can only be extended by Microsoft and doesn't have any sort of vendor extension mechanism. So if hardware vendors want to experiment with new features, their only option is to implement it in their driver-specific libraries.
The actual issue is that certain games and engines, most notably UE4, assume that loading nvapi is guaranteed to succeed on an Nvidia GPU, and try to load the library on a performance-critical code path. This is why you see UE4 games that *should* run at 60 FPS on a given Nvidia card suddenly drop to 10 FPS, while it runs completely fine on AMD and Intel hardware. In case of UE4, you might partially blame Nvidia because they are Epic's tech partner, but ultimately this issue wouldn't exist if developers didn't make poor assumptions and used error handling instead.
Same goes for AGS. Granted, I've only seen one single game so far where AGS is a problem, that being Assassin's Creed Syndicate, but it has the exact same issue. Runs fine on AMD after spoofing an Nvidia GPU.
I've been hesitant to do report Nvidia GPUs as AMD GPUs by default because it skews statistics, but with Proton doing it anyway I might as well pull this change. Still not a fan of it though.
Last edited by YoRHa-2B on 1 November 2018 at 8:57 am UTC
16 Likes, Who?
Quoting: ShmerlYeah I got the part about Nvidia being reported as AMD but that won't affect steam stats at all? Steam will still see the card correctly. It'll just lie to Windows games.Quoting: ScooptaQuoting: loggeHaha, now Nvidia gets their parts of being closed-source only! What a day!I'm not sure what exactly you were trying to say but it sounds sort of like a dig on Nvidia yet you have an nvidia card?
Nvidia cards are reported as AMD cards now, so Nvidia usage will plummet in Steam stats. Thanks to Nvidia pushing their lock-in APIs.
1 Likes, Who?
HyperRealisticRock Nov 1, 2018
Huge boost in UE4 games like 'the park' 5-10 FPS now up to 50-60 FPS.
2 Likes, Who?
Perkeleen_Vittupää Nov 1, 2018
I saw Alan Wake came back to Steam, bought it right on and works flawless!
4 Likes, Who?
Quoting: MerpDo you guys use the betas? Just wondering if it's worth switching from the stable version.
From day one all I've used has been the Beta. On the one hand, I can't say it's better or worse than the Stable because I've never used the Stable. On the other hand, I've never had any real issues either. I figure if it doesn't work, it doesn't work. If I really want to play it I can try Wine or just wait.
Quoting: liamdaweFor corefonts, they're not using the actual MSFT fonts, instead they're using liberation-fonts
This is so cool!
Last edited by Nanobang on 1 November 2018 at 12:06 pm UTC
1 Likes, Who?
wvstolzing Nov 1, 2018
Quoting: YoRHa-2BSame goes for AGS. Granted, I've only seen one single game so far where AGS is a problem, that being Assassin's Creed Syndicate, but it has the exact same issue. Runs fine on AMD after spoofing an Nvidia GPU.
This is somewhat off-topic, but regarding Assassin's Creed -- when do you think the fix for the uplay login bug, which came in wine-staging 3.19 a while back, would be incorporated in 'regular' wine, and proton?
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Quoting: ScooptaHe has a core i7-920, that's 2009 calling.Quoting: loggeHaha, now Nvidia gets their parts of being closed-source only! What a day!I'm not sure what exactly you were trying to say but it sounds sort of like a dig on Nvidia yet you have an nvidia card?
And an nvidia gtx 1060? How would that work?
@logge: I really want to know, because I have an 920 too. Still with 6GB, but the CPU seems faster than the i5 in my steam machine (with unfortunately an Nvidia card).
I wonder if an R9-270 would be able to run new drivers.
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Quoting: GuestGTA V for example.Quoting: stankalovichBenchmarking Nvidia and AMD cards in Proton should now be a more true level playing field.I doubt it's gonna change anything. I also never had this issue that is supposed to be being fixed.
I've never even seen examples of it, so I'm not sure why they'd be doing it; what games is it supposed to fix?
And there are more games that use nvidia dll's, that needed to be winestubbed to make them work.
I think GTA III, IV, SA and IV EFLC needed stubbing on an nvidia, as they worked almost directly on non nvidia.
1 Likes, Who?
Quoting: wvstolzingQuoting: YoRHa-2BSame goes for AGS. Granted, I've only seen one single game so far where AGS is a problem, that being Assassin's Creed Syndicate, but it has the exact same issue. Runs fine on AMD after spoofing an Nvidia GPU.
This is somewhat off-topic, but regarding Assassin's Creed -- when do you think the fix for the uplay login bug, which came in wine-staging 3.19 a while back, would be incorporated in 'regular' wine, and proton?
These connectivity issues ( Uplay, Quake Champions etc ) needs a Steam Runtime update for gnutls. Which is WIP.
1 Likes, Who?
Quoting: GuestDXVK also still seems to read the cards and drivers used correctly (with DXVK_HUD) like I said, it's probably not gonna change anything, I'm just worried it might break some games for nvidia cards, if this really was an issue, it should have been done on a per-game basis rather than for all games, considering it seems to be a rare issue in the first place.
its not rare at all, basically all the UE4 games have this issue, some unity games iirc and some other games.
the other way around is more rare. When you need to fake your AMD GPU as nvidia.
1 Likes, Who?
Comandante Ñoñardo Nov 1, 2018
Quoting: mylkabut who needs bejeweled,....
Literally, my mom, a casual gamer of 70 years...
I activated an spare Bejeweled 3 code in her Steam account and it works as native.
Plus, several Hidden Objects games are not available for Linux, but they work as native via Proton..
Not all steam users are hardcore gamer nerds and I suppose that Valve want to cover all fronts, including casual gaming.
I was asking about the process in general..
Is Valve using contracted BETA testers? Volunteers?
Or is Codeweavers behind the whitelist process?
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Quoting: ArdjeHe has a core i7-920, that's 2009 calling.
And an nvidia gtx 1060? How would that work?
@logge: I really want to know, because I have an 920 too. Still with 6GB, but the CPU seems faster than the i5 in my steam machine (with unfortunately an Nvidia card).
I wonder if an R9-270 would be able to run new drivers.
The R9 270 (and any pitcairn GCN 1 card) works just fine with Vulkan and Proton provided you have the amdgpu kernel module loaded instead of radeon. I have one with an i5-2500K and it works just fine.
Also don't forget, even though Valve say Vulkan drivers are required that is technically not true as Wine's own D3D->OpenGL layer is still there and can be forced with some environment variables. I've not had the chance to test it out on a system that did not already support Vulkan though.
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FirearmsUnited Nov 1, 2018
Quoting: ghiumaUnfortunately elex crashes when I turn on the xbox360 controller, the keyboard works great, you know a way to avoid the crash...
Thanks for the hint! I play ELEX as well and it (or wine) always locks up after around an hour of gameplay. Since now I always suspected some lighting or particle effects to be the culprit since in my experience it always locks up when using either the jetpack or a flare. Sound is looping, music is playing normally and game is stuck.
However I have a wireless XBOX controller receiver connected that I no disconnected. I will check if my won't hang up any more with this and report back.
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Comandante Ñoñardo Nov 1, 2018
Quoting: Guesteeeee, just got done testing Killing Floor 2
No longer run into the issue where my game would crash if I tried to use server browser
Just been playing past hour or two and working great, big deal for me too because it's one of the main games I dual boot into windows for.. Definitely not going to have to boot into windows as much anymore ^^
What about the perk stats bug?
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Arranmc182 Nov 1, 2018
Quoting: MerpDo you guys use the betas? Just wondering if it's worth switching from the stable version.
I have only ever used the Beta and works fine for me, I played THPS HD & Sonic Mania just fine on the beta's but its super easy to switch so worth a try then if you dont like it switch back.
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Nevertheless Nov 1, 2018
With this update Bards Tale 4 finally seems to work with a reasonable performance. I wonder what games also take advantage of this Nvidia / AMD personification solution...
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