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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.
Tags: Proton, Steam, Valve, Wine
44 Likes
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Ardje Nov 1, 2018
Quoting: Scoopta
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?
He 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.
Ardje Nov 1, 2018
Quoting: Guest
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?
GTA V for example.
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.
Leopard Nov 1, 2018
Quoting: wvstolzing
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?

These connectivity issues ( Uplay, Quake Champions etc ) needs a Steam Runtime update for gnutls. Which is WIP.
Xpander Nov 1, 2018
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.
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?
MagicMyth Nov 1, 2018
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.
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.
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?
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.
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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