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Proton Experimental was updated today by Valve for Steam Deck / Linux PCs which includes some more improvements for gaming.

Noted as now playable as of this May 17th update is Planet of the Apes: Last Frontier.

Here's some of the other improvements:

  • Improved Chinese font rendering in Cosmoteer Starship Architect & Commander.
  • Improved font rendering in Alien Swarm: Reactive Drop on Steam Deck.
  • Fixed Descent 3 not working in GL mode.
  • Fixed Bloons Monkey City thinking it's offline with IPv6 support disabled.
  • Fixed Halo Infinite rendering using a weird resolution on a Steam Deck.

Plus they're also now limiting the CPU cores seen by Call of Juarez: Gunslinger as well to make it playable on high core-count CPUs. They did the same fix for Command & Conquer and The Covert Operations in a previous Experimental update.

Pictured - Call of Juarez: Gunslinger

Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.
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9 comments

CatKiller May 17
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QuotePlus they're also now limiting the CPU cores seen by Call of Juarez: Gunslinger as well to make it playable on high core-count CPUs. They did the same fix for Command & Conquer and The Covert Operations in a previous Experimental update.

It's weird that this keeps cropping up as an issue. High core-count machines have been around for quite a while now, and dev machines tend to have more cores than gaming machines, so you'd think that this was the kind of thing that would be spotted and fixed by game devs themselves.
damarrin May 17
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At least Call of Juarez is a game from 2007, I'd say the most you could count on back then were two cores.
Calinou May 17
Quoting: CatKiller
QuotePlus they're also now limiting the CPU cores seen by Call of Juarez: Gunslinger as well to make it playable on high core-count CPUs. They did the same fix for Command & Conquer and The Covert Operations in a previous Experimental update.

It's weird that this keeps cropping up as an issue. High core-count machines have been around for quite a while now, and dev machines tend to have more cores than gaming machines, so you'd think that this was the kind of thing that would be spotted and fixed by game devs themselves.

In terms of performance, negative core scaling is still a common issue in modern AAA games. A fair amount of games perform better if you only expose 8 physical cores to them at most. It's usually caused by games spawning too many threads for tasks that can only be parallelized so much, simply because you have a CPU with more than 16 threads (assuming HyperThreading).
Woodlandor May 17
Quoting: damarrinAt least Call of Juarez is a game from 2007, I'd say the most you could count on back then were two cores.

640Kb should be enough for everyone
TimeFreeze May 17
Quoting: damarrinAt least Call of Juarez is a game from 2007, I'd say the most you could count on back then were two cores.

The game in question is Gunslinger though and that one is from 2013.
damarrin May 17
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Oh, right, that's Gunslinger. Well, then. Incompetent game devs. Or something.
shadow1w2 May 17
Weird I was playing Gunslinger last year, though it seems I used GE-Proton instead which I tend to hop over to if a game even twitches for a second but nice to see the old game getting some attention officially.
F.Ultra May 18
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Quoting: CatKiller
QuotePlus they're also now limiting the CPU cores seen by Call of Juarez: Gunslinger as well to make it playable on high core-count CPUs. They did the same fix for Command & Conquer and The Covert Operations in a previous Experimental update.

It's weird that this keeps cropping up as an issue. High core-count machines have been around for quite a while now, and dev machines tend to have more cores than gaming machines, so you'd think that this was the kind of thing that would be spotted and fixed by game devs themselves.

I don't see how the game devs would be on especially powerful machines, Ubisoft and EA is probably handing out the bare minimum they can get away with.

Anyway the game is from 2013 and while that is only 11 years ago the best selling CPU that year was a dual core and the highest core count on a top 10 list for 2013 is a quad core so I find it perfectly understandable that the game isn't optimized for 32+ core machines (the imposed new limit in proton for this game is 31 cores). Also games takes years to develop so whatever machines the devs used they bought much earlier than 2013.


Quoting: shadow1w2Weird I was playing Gunslinger last year, though it seems I used GE-Proton instead which I tend to hop over to if a game even twitches for a second but nice to see the old game getting some attention officially.

The new limit is 31 cores so perhaps you have fewer than 32 :)


Last edited by F.Ultra on 18 May 2024 at 7:36 pm UTC
hardpenguin May 20
I remember that COJ:Gunslinger was playable from the very beginning of Proton!

When Proton was just announced I was trying out a bunch of demo versions and demo for Gunslinger ran like a dream.
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