Steam Play Proton 4.11-3 is out, big changes for gamepads and new D9VK

Valve and CodeWeavers continue pushing Linux gaming along with another release of Proton for Steam Play with 4.11-3.

The biggest change here seems to be for gamepads. Proton will no longer emulate them all as if they were Xbox controllers, instead games will access them directly. So DualShock 4 (PS4) gamepads, fighting pads and more should behave more like they do on Windows.

fsync (the experimental replacement for esync) also saw some improvements to hangs and crashes, as well as gaining configurable spin count. This new config ability they say might help performance but it's disabled by default.

Additionally they added missing language fonts, in-game web browser fixes, more fixes for crashes related to text input with Mordhau and Deep Rock Galactic being noted, improved support for older VR titles and support for the latest Steamworks and OpenVR SDK versions.

It also pulls in the recent new release of D9VK, considering it only released yesterday that's quite impressive really. You still need to manually enable D9VK for D3D9 titles though, like this:

PROTON_USE_D9VK=1 %command%

Use the above for D9VK as a launch option (right click -> Properties -> Set Launch Options) for each game as needed.

You can see the full changelog here.