The first Steam Play update for this year is out with Proton 3.16-7 beta

I don't enjoy having a 50 GB game backup eating up disk space.

50 . . . gigs. For one game. I've had hard drives way smaller than that. I've had adventure games I plugged away at for hours and never finished that were 16K. OK, I didn't finish them mostly because they were badly designed, but still. What is the excuse for a game taking up 50 gigs?
Sorry, my old curmudgeon is showing, but really . . . 50. gigs.

The new DOOM is 71 GB, Project Cars 2 is 52 GB, Deus Ex Mankind Divided is 60 GB. Those are the biggest games I have installed at the moment :D

I have been using the 3.16.6 version with Banished. I always had to kill it manually after exit, because it wouldn't stop and slowed down the system significantly. Now with the 3.16.7 version it exits without problems and slowdowns, but the gameplay itself became sluggish. They don't want me to get bored.

I don't enjoy having a 50 GB game backup eating up disk space.

50 . . . gigs. For one game. I've had hard drives way smaller than that. I've had adventure games I plugged away at for hours and never finished that were 16K. OK, I didn't finish them mostly because they were badly designed, but still. What is the excuse for a game taking up 50 gigs?
Sorry, my old curmudgeon is showing, but really . . . 50. gigs.

The new DOOM is 71 GB, Project Cars 2 is 52 GB, Deus Ex Mankind Divided is 60 GB. Those are the biggest games I have installed at the moment :D

Doom's ridiculous size is probably due to the multiplayer & level editor, which they haven't been arsed to move to a separate install.

I think GTA5 is also in the ~70G range.

I don't enjoy having a 50 GB game backup eating up disk space.

50 . . . gigs. For one game. I've had hard drives way smaller than that. I've had adventure games I plugged away at for hours and never finished that were 16K. OK, I didn't finish them mostly because they were badly designed, but still. What is the excuse for a game taking up 50 gigs?
Sorry, my old curmudgeon is showing, but really . . . 50. gigs.

Some games are impressively large, aren't they? I can't speak for the detail of why any particular game is the size it is, but I can give you some indications as to why.

The first thing to understand is that games are always trying to do more than the hardware computational ability will allow. A lot of developer time is spent in finding ways to get a higher quality or accuracy, but with the same or lower computational cost at runtime. Almost all of these techniques boil down to pre-computing "stuff" and storing it in data files ( usually image-like texture files ). Then, at runtime, the game just fetches the pre-computed values using a simple algorithm rather than using expensive calculations every frame.

If you compare games of, say, 15 years ago with today, the largest textures have increased in size from 512x512 to 4096x4096, which is 64 times the number of data locations per texture.

A typical character model 15 years ago may have used textures with fewer than 10 data values per location, most of which would be 1 byte each. A modern game renderer could easily need 10 times as much data.

Pre-calculation to data files is also used for non-character models ( buildings and other "placeable" props ) as well as light-maps and shadow maps if circumstances allow ( typically indoor environments with mostly static lighting ); in fact, whatever the ingenuity of games developers can come up with.

This explosion of texture data has partly been offset by better compression algorithms. GPUs implement the read of compressed data in hardware, so it does not cost much processing power.

Alongside this, the geometry data describing the shape of models has increased in like fashion, animation based on curve calculations has been replaced by data-intensive motion-capture, and there are now often multiple copies of everything at different quality levels to cater for the broader range of modern player hardware.

This is a generalization and simplification, but I'm sure you get the gist of it. Modern games without lots of immersive 3D models are much smaller, on the whole.

Sniper Ghost Warrior 3 via PROTON 3.16-7..

Is that the amount of system RAM used or the amount GPU memory used?

I don't know for certain, but I would expect it to be the GPU allocation, since that is what DXVK is most interested in. CPU allocation is less important since the OS can provide virtual memory.

If it is the GPU memory used, that can explain the FPS drops, because my GTX 970 has 3.5GB....

I don't enjoy having a 50 GB game backup eating up disk space.

50 . . . gigs. For one game. I've had hard drives way smaller than that. I've had adventure games I plugged away at for hours and never finished that were 16K. OK, I didn't finish them mostly because they were badly designed, but still. What is the excuse for a game taking up 50 gigs?
Sorry, my old curmudgeon is showing, but really . . . 50. gigs.

Some games are impressively large, aren't they? I can't speak for the detail of why any particular game is the size it is, but I can give you some indications as to why.

The first thing to understand is that games are always trying to do more than the hardware computational ability will allow. A lot of developer time is spent in finding ways to get a higher quality or accuracy, but with the same or lower computational cost at runtime. Almost all of these techniques boil down to pre-computing "stuff" and storing it in data files ( usually image-like texture files ). Then, at runtime, the game just fetches the pre-computed values using a simple algorithm rather than using expensive calculations every frame.

If you compare games of, say, 15 years ago with today, the largest textures have increased in size from 512x512 to 4096x4096, which is 64 times the number of data locations per texture.

A typical character model 15 years ago may have used textures with fewer than 10 data values per location, most of which would be 1 byte each. A modern game renderer could easily need 10 times as much data.

Pre-calculation to data files is also used for non-character models ( buildings and other "placeable" props ) as well as light-maps and shadow maps if circumstances allow ( typically indoor environments with mostly static lighting ); in fact, whatever the ingenuity of games developers can come up with.

This explosion of texture data has partly been offset by better compression algorithms. GPUs implement the read of compressed data in hardware, so it does not cost much processing power.

Alongside this, the geometry data describing the shape of models has increased in like fashion, animation based on curve calculations has been replaced by data-intensive motion-capture, and there are now often multiple copies of everything at different quality levels to cater for the broader range of modern player hardware.

This is a generalization and simplification, but I'm sure you get the gist of it. Modern games without lots of immersive 3D models are much smaller, on the whole.

In the case of Divinity: Original Sin 2, another factor might be uncompressed or very little audio compression. There is a lot of voiced dialogue. I'm just guessing here, but that's what came to my mind first.

I don't enjoy having a 50 GB game backup eating up disk space.

50 . . . gigs. For one game. I've had hard drives way smaller than that. I've had adventure games I plugged away at for hours and never finished that were 16K. OK, I didn't finish them mostly because they were badly designed, but still. What is the excuse for a game taking up 50 gigs?
Sorry, my old curmudgeon is showing, but really . . . 50. gigs.

Some games are impressively large, aren't they? I can't speak for the detail of why any particular game is the size it is, but I can give you some indications as to why.

The first thing to understand is that games are always trying to do more than the hardware computational ability will allow. A lot of developer time is spent in finding ways to get a higher quality or accuracy, but with the same or lower computational cost at runtime. Almost all of these techniques boil down to pre-computing "stuff" and storing it in data files ( usually image-like texture files ). Then, at runtime, the game just fetches the pre-computed values using a simple algorithm rather than using expensive calculations every frame.

If you compare games of, say, 15 years ago with today, the largest textures have increased in size from 512x512 to 4096x4096, which is 64 times the number of data locations per texture.

A typical character model 15 years ago may have used textures with fewer than 10 data values per location, most of which would be 1 byte each. A modern game renderer could easily need 10 times as much data.

Pre-calculation to data files is also used for non-character models ( buildings and other "placeable" props ) as well as light-maps and shadow maps if circumstances allow ( typically indoor environments with mostly static lighting ); in fact, whatever the ingenuity of games developers can come up with.

This explosion of texture data has partly been offset by better compression algorithms. GPUs implement the read of compressed data in hardware, so it does not cost much processing power.

Alongside this, the geometry data describing the shape of models has increased in like fashion, animation based on curve calculations has been replaced by data-intensive motion-capture, and there are now often multiple copies of everything at different quality levels to cater for the broader range of modern player hardware.

This is a generalization and simplification, but I'm sure you get the gist of it. Modern games without lots of immersive 3D models are much smaller, on the whole.

In the case of Divinity: Original Sin 2, another factor might be uncompressed or very little audio compression. There is a lot of voiced dialogue. I'm just guessing here, but that's what came to my mind first.

Could be; what takes the space is very game dependent, but textures are usually the culprit for really big new games. With Bethesda games, for example, original Skyrim was 6GB with an optional 4.5GB high-resolution texture pack, whereas Fallout 4 is 28GB with an optionl high-resolution texture pack of 58GB for a whopping total of 86GB. There is quite a lot of audio in Fallout 4, but it clearly doesn't contribute much to the overall size.

looks like Kenshi 1.0.13 experimental version works fine now. if anyone is interested in that. :)

The "Press space to continue" bug of Bioshock 2 Remastered continue in PROTON 3.16-7

I know there are workarounds suck using the button A of an xbox controller or use -nointro, but is not the same...
Is a WINE/PROTON issue that MUST BE SOLVED, because on my Windows 7 machine the game works out of the box.

Does it runs Elite Dangerous or we still need that unofficial Proton build?

Elite Dangerous runs under Wine/Proton? This is new to me.

Yea, you need to install an unofficial version, like I said:
https://github.com/redmcg/wine/releases/tag/ED_Proton_3.16-5_Beta

Enjoy


Last edited by Thormack on 19 February 2019 at 6:04 am UTC

When I add non steam game, where is the prefix of these games?

Each version of Proton is a management wrapper for Steam-Installed games using a specific version of Wine ( including extension libraries/patches etc ).

As you probably know, each Steam-Installed game is identified by a unique integer number; Proton creates/uses a Wine prefix for each game as a directory named for that unique integer, in the "compatdata" directory of the Steam games library you choose to install in.

I do not think Proton is capable of doing this for non-Steam games, so a non-Steam game will use the wine prefix you chose when installing that game. If you make no wineprefix choice, the default is "~/.wine/".

Note that it is generally better to install each non-steam game to a different wine prefix, since games often have conflicting configuration needs. i.e. Configuring one game may break another if they share a wineprefix.

Hope that helps.

No, It doesn't use the main wine folder. I found it at the main steam folder with a bigger number that normal games use >>> ~/.steam/steam/steamapps/compatdata/2147483650

When I add non steam game, where is the prefix of these games?

Each version of Proton is a management wrapper for Steam-Installed games using a specific version of Wine ( including extension libraries/patches etc ).

As you probably know, each Steam-Installed game is identified by a unique integer number; Proton creates/uses a Wine prefix for each game as a directory named for that unique integer, in the "compatdata" directory of the Steam games library you choose to install in.

I do not think Proton is capable of doing this for non-Steam games, so a non-Steam game will use the wine prefix you chose when installing that game. If you make no wineprefix choice, the default is "~/.wine/".

Note that it is generally better to install each non-steam game to a different wine prefix, since games often have conflicting configuration needs. i.e. Configuring one game may break another if they share a wineprefix.

Hope that helps.

No, It doesn't use the main wine folder. I found it at the main steam folder with a bigger number that normal games use >>> ~/.steam/steam/steamapps/compatdata/2147483650

Interesting. Does that means you have to install each non-Steam game with its own copy of, say Origin or Uplay, I wonder. I thought you just added games you had already installed so you can launch them. I will have to look more into what the options are, though I don't really understand why one would use the feature except for running Big Picture with only a controller.