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Continuing our monthly look over the data dumps provided by ProtonDB, the unofficial reports website for tracking how well Steam Play games run, here's the July 2019 instalment.

July was a pretty quiet month right up until the end, with Proton 4.11-1 being released. Hopefully bringing on more compatibility, although we won't really see that until next time due to the release date. It was a pretty exciting release though, with some working being done to help anti-cheat systems. Valve also updated the whitelist as well.

This time, let's start by going over the overall stats on ProtonDB for all titles. Going by their data, there's currently:

  • 1,082 - Platinum
  • 1,138 - Gold
  • 733 - Silver
  • 397 - Bronze
  • 482 - Borked (Broken)

Now a quick look at how many reports in total have been going into ProtonDB monthly as far back as the data goes:

Still getting thousands of reports, a healthy amount although nothing close to the first two months where there was a bit of a scramble as people went to report all kinds of games. Now it's more focused, with people going back and re-testing their favourites and some new releases as they come.

The more interesting measure, is the type of reports we're seeing coming in. With the majority of them continuing to be at Platinum which is impressive:

Next up, we have a list of games that have been getting the most reports. This list is basically an interesting look into what are perhaps the most popular Steam Play games and many entries aren't exactly surprising, with several titles constantly there like Grand Theft Auto V, The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt and Path of Exile and it's going to take some really big releases to knock some of them off:

Name Number of reports
Grand Theft Auto V 49
Warframe 37
The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt 35
DOOM 33
MONSTER HUNTER: WORLD 27
Path of Exile 26
Prey 26
Kingdom Come: Deliverance 25
Wolfenstein: Youngblood 23
Elite Dangerous 21
Grim Dawn 19
Fallout 4 18
The Elder Scrolls Online 16
Hellblade: Senua's Sacrifice 15
Risk of Rain 2 15

Wolfenstein: Youngblood is the notable new title popping up there with 23 reports, as it was released on July 25th with a lot of excitement.

Going into the deep end, what games saw a lot of Platinum reports across July? Not only is this another interesting way to see what's popular, it's also a good way to find some safe games to try out with Steam Play.

Name Number of platinum reports
The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt 29
DOOM 22
Prey 17
Grim Dawn 16
Wolfenstein: Youngblood 14
Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night 13
Risk of Rain 2 12
Path of Exile 11
The Elder Scrolls Online 11
Wolfenstein: The New Order 11
Wolfenstein II: The New Colossus 11
Hellblade: Senua's Sacrifice 11
Deep Rock Galactic 11
NieR:Automata 10
Grand Theft Auto V 10

As for games that only started getting reports on ProtonDB during July, here's the top ten based on the number of reports being at a Platinum level.

Name Platinum
Wolfenstein: Youngblood 14
Break the G̵amè̢̢͘ 5
Love is Dead 4
Atma 3
Killsquad 3
Hot Shot Burn 3
Totally Reliable Delivery Service Beta 3
Automachef 3
7th Sector 2
Paperbark 2

A breakdown of reports by Linux distribution used:

Finally, a little insight into the CPU/GPU being used from the reports:

For those interested, the public data is stored here on GitHub. See you next month for another quick look.

We're also closing in on the first year since Steam Play released—crazy! We'll have something to say about that on the day.

Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.
Tags: Proton, Steam, Valve
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Mal Aug 6, 2019
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Not every contributor reads the score guidelines on ProtonDB and there is definitely a bias toward platinum there (games that works but with a hack, games that works but no cutscenes or no multiplayer, or occasional glitches/crash and such).

The platinum score is definitely a little bit inflated right now. Since now the development is going on so fast it can't be helped, but when proton leaves beta it would be useful to have a redacted list of scores so that reviewers filter out the noise.
Philadelphus Aug 6, 2019
Quoting: Ehvis
Quoting: EikeSo, BTW and IMHO, having to set environment variables would be gold, not platinum.

Something not all submitters appear to honour. I see a lot of platinum reports that still mention a specific setting. So I expect the realistic number of platinums to be lower in favour of gold.
Yeah. I see Age of Empires II regularly gets a bunch of platinum ratings, despite the fact that I needed to delete a launcher file and rename the game executable to get it to run, making it a solid gold. (It's possible this has changed since I got it working several months ago, but even back then people were rating it platinum.)

I get that sometimes it can be difficult to figure out the exact rating for a particular game, but in this case it's easy: if you have to do anything other than "click Play" to get a game to run, it's not platinum. :) And that's not a disparagement of the game or Proton or anything, as some people seem to think it is; what we need are accurate reports, not ones made through rose-colored glasses. Windows users switching to Linux because they read all their games were literally "click'n'play" are not going to be pleased to find out that's not actually the case.
Brisse Aug 6, 2019
Quoting: PhiladelphusYeah. I see Age of Empires II regularly gets a bunch of platinum ratings, despite the fact that I needed to delete a launcher file and rename the game executable to get it to run, making it a solid gold. (It's possible this has changed since I got it working several months ago, but even back then people were rating it platinum.)

Are you sure that's necessary? I remember having to do that in Wine a few years back, but in Proton, at least the latest version, it just worked, including the launcher.
BOYSSSSS Aug 6, 2019
Quoting: TheSHEEEPAnd for that information, Platinum = just works out of the box, I don't have to do anything. Gold = works once you do X.
For that purpose, it is entirely irrelevant if what you have to do is a Proton option or a game option or edit some config files. It either runs perfectly without doing anything, or it runs perfectly after doing something. At least as far as users are concerned, which should always be the goal of tool development.

I get that whitelisting isn't really possible if something needs to be changed about the game itself, but that is something to be discussed in Github Proton/Valve issues, not something ProtonDB should be decisive in.

And if all that is required to run a game via Proton on Steam is to set some Proton option, then that Proton option should simply be set by default when running the game -> thus, the user has to do nothing and the game "just works" -> Platinum. All other cases -> Gold or worse.

IMO it doesn't make sense for Gold to include every possible change needed from user. There's a big difference between changing installing/adding files to run the game and adding a Launch option like NO_D3D11 ESYNC FSYNC or USE_D9VK. There should be another rating like Titanium or something which is just for Environment Variables/arguments/Launch options. It would also be great if there were two ratings, one for how the game runs, another for performance compared to native.
Ehvis Aug 6, 2019
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Quoting: Avehicle7887Something to point out with ProtonDB is that even if a game is reported as Borked, these are to be taken with a grain of salt. Some reports mention a specific game may run with plain wine, while some others are so old they don't reflect current status.

Funny enough, the opposite is also true. There are games that are still listed as working (silver or so) but are actually completely broken since a later update (due to adding EAC for instance).
TheRiddick Aug 6, 2019
I recently submitted Empyrion as borked on Proton 4.11, however it works fine (minus EAC) on proton 4.2.

Also I'd like to say Risen3 works quite well with PROTON_USE_D9VK=1 %command%, even reshade functions! (bit of cache skipping going on tho)


Last edited by TheRiddick on 6 August 2019 at 10:58 am UTC
BOYSSSSS Aug 6, 2019
I've also noticed allot of people rating the game based on it's performance, they always note how it runs around 50fps and if you disable anti-aliasing etc you get 60fps. And based on that they give a game Gold rating instead of Platinum.


Last edited by BOYSSSSS on 6 August 2019 at 11:05 am UTC
TheSHEEEP Aug 6, 2019
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Quoting: BOYSSSSS
Quoting: TheSHEEEPAnd for that information, Platinum = just works out of the box, I don't have to do anything. Gold = works once you do X.
For that purpose, it is entirely irrelevant if what you have to do is a Proton option or a game option or edit some config files. It either runs perfectly without doing anything, or it runs perfectly after doing something. At least as far as users are concerned, which should always be the goal of tool development.

I get that whitelisting isn't really possible if something needs to be changed about the game itself, but that is something to be discussed in Github Proton/Valve issues, not something ProtonDB should be decisive in.

And if all that is required to run a game via Proton on Steam is to set some Proton option, then that Proton option should simply be set by default when running the game -> thus, the user has to do nothing and the game "just works" -> Platinum. All other cases -> Gold or worse.

IMO it doesn't make sense for Gold to include every possible change needed from user. There's a big difference between changing installing/adding files to run the game and adding a Launch option like NO_D3D11 ESYNC FSYNC or USE_D9VK. There should be another rating like Titanium or something which is just for Environment Variables/arguments/Launch options. It would also be great if there were two ratings, one for how the game runs, another for performance compared to native.
The ratings sure aren't perfect.
Introducing more rating woulds likely lead to even more confusion and unclear ratings, though.

What could work is to split the single rating into multiple parts without subjective judgements required.
Only yes/no questions (+ the Proton version & system info & comment, of course), leaving no room for uncertainty.
1. Does this game run perfectly for you?
2. Did you have to to enable Proton flags?
3. Did you have to run the game with non-Proton parameters?
4. Did you have to take other steps to make the game run?

Of course you can't have too many of these, but going away from anything requiring people to give an unclear score sounds like an improvement to me.


Last edited by TheSHEEEP on 6 August 2019 at 11:32 am UTC
TheRiddick Aug 6, 2019
You could have 3 Ratings,

1) Game works how well from scale 1 to 10 (10 being as good as or better then windows)
2) Workarounds needed (section provides fields for people to define steps taken)
3) Borked, doesn't work.

That seems good enough to me.
BOYSSSSS Aug 6, 2019
There's another thing. I see people give lower ratings for games because they had to do something because of a game specific bug. I think the ratings are for proton specific bugs, not game specific and it doesn't make sense to give a lower rating for something that a Windows user also has to do.
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