Today marks 6 years since Valve decided to change everything, especially for Linux fans, with the announcement of Steam Play Proton. Thanks to it, the Steam Deck and Desktop Linux gaming have continued to thrive. Want a Proton beginner's guide? Got you covered at this link.
Heck, the Steam Deck never would have been a thing without Proton. Could you imagine it? Trying to market a Linux handheld without the vast majority of games people want to play? It was also only in February this year that Valve actually decided to give it a logo too.
Pictured - Proton's official logo
Thanks to all the work put into Proton from Valve developers, contractors and everyone who contributes to Wine development that Proton is based upon, we have a ridiculous amount of games where you can just click the Play button and forget about everything else in Steam.
Going by the official Valve Proton GitHub, there's been 66 releases of Proton during this time, and that's not counting all the interim updates to Proton Experimental and Proton Hotfix for quick game-specific fixes. The Proton changelog has seen 388 changes, although some will be text corrections, that's again showing just how much goes into it. It's an incredible amount of work when you think about just how many games are on Steam, and developers really love to do some weird stuff that Valve often has to work around. And let's not forget the likes of CodeWeavers, who employ people to work on Wine and Proton.
As for the current state of Desktop Linux and Steam Deck gaming overall…
Looking over the current numbers on ProtonDB, the community website where anyone can report how games work: there's 22,002 games reported to work by at least one person, 13,297 by at least two people and 9,751 that has three or more reports.
Going by Valve's own Steam Deck Verified system there's 5,297 rated Verified and 10,646 rated Playable.
Both ProtonDB and Valve's own ratings are only a small slice of Steam though, which has over 100,000 according to the Game tag on SteamDB. There's only so many games Valve can test officially and that people can report to ProtonDB, so there's likely thousands of games not reported by anyone that will just work out of the box with Proton.
Pictured - HELLDIVERS 2 on Linux
It's pretty amazing that we can play the likes of HELLDIVERS 2, Baldur's Gate 3, Black Myth: Wukong, Grand Theft Auto V, Cyberpunk 2077, Fallout 4, Balatro, ELDEN RING, Hades II, Dead by Daylight, No Man's Sky and so many more at the click of a button in Steam now.
Now we just need more anti-cheat support, including from developers who already use anti-cheat that is supported to actually enable it. This is really the last major hurdle.
So here we are again, happy birthday to Proton, 6 years strong enabling gaming on Linux and Steam Deck to be an incredible thing.
Be sure to follow the Steam Play RSS feed for all Proton-related updates!
Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.
I remember the talk here, not very long before Proton was made, when porting studios were noticeably slowing down after the Steam Machine’s failure to gain momentum and people were calling the end of Linux gaming; how we missed our only chance and now people would write off Linux as a consumer OS for good. It doesn’t feel like 6 years have passed already, and we’ve finally beaten the Mac user share. Incredible gambit by Valve and I’m so glad it paid off.To be fair, beating the Mac share took a lot of co-operation from the MacOS people; without their sterling work dumping their user share through the floor, we'd still be behind!
- Make RTX Remix possible, as it uses a fork of DXVK.
- Basically fix performance of some Windows games (mainly GTA IV, but many others also benefit). If a Windows user talks to you about DXVK, they probably tried it on GTA IV at some point. It's really that much of a requirement to enjoy that game on modern PCs :)
- Fix/reduce shader compilation stutter in some games through DXVK Async.
- Provide an easy way to run old games on modern Windows/Linux versions, with support for graphical enhancements, automatic FPS caps (to avoid gameplay issues) and so on. The recently-added D3D8 support opens this to a lot more games released in the early 2000s. dgVoodoo can also do that, but it's not open source and is more cumbersome to set up.
In the end, everyone benefitted from an initiative that was mostly designed around Linux gaming at first.
Last edited by Calinou on 23 August 2024 at 1:27 am UTC
I feel DXVK had such a positive impact on gaming as a whole. It did so much more than just improve the state of Linux gaming:
- Make RTX Remix possible, as it uses a fork of DXVK.
- Basically fix performance of some Windows games (mainly GTA IV, but many others also benefit). If a Windows user talks to you about DXVK, they probably tried it on GTA IV at some point. It's really that much of a requirement to enjoy that game on modern PCs :)
- Fix/reduce shader compilation stutter in some games through DXVK Async.
- Provide an easy way to run old games on modern Windows/Linux versions, with support for graphical enhancements, automatic FPS caps (to avoid gameplay issues) and so on. The recently-added D3D8 support opens this to a lot more games released in the early 2000s. dgVoodoo can also do that, but it's not open source and is more cumbersome to set up.
In the end, everyone benefitted from an initiative that was mostly designed around Linux gaming at first.
And that my friend is "the tide that lifts all boats" and one of the primary advertisements to businesses for open source and a direct effect from the third software freedom.
To quote the fsf in the third of the four software freedoms: "By doing this you can give the whole community a chance to benefit from your changes."
The designers of DXVK didn't care enough about these improvements to make them, but they refused to stop them, so they gave others the freedom to make them and now they're here.
I feel DXVK had such a positive impact on gaming as a whole. It did so much more than just improve the state of Linux gaming:
- Make RTX Remix possible, as it uses a fork of DXVK.
- Basically fix performance of some Windows games (mainly GTA IV, but many others also benefit). If a Windows user talks to you about DXVK, they probably tried it on GTA IV at some point. It's really that much of a requirement to enjoy that game on modern PCs :)
DXVK is also a method to make games playable on Windows 7.
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