Valve have begun the next round of testing for a new main version of Proton, the compatibility layer to run Windows games on Steam Deck and Desktop Linux. Announced on the same day as Proton's 6th anniversary!
The current list of changes is tentative, and may go through adjustments based on testing before the final release of Proton 9.0-3. Additionally, everything listed has been in either Proton Experimental or Proton Hotfix first and so this is rolling it out to the stable version of Proton.
Here's all that's changed:
- Now playable:
- Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora (desktop only)
- Ball at Work: The Ultimate Speedrun Platformer!
- Banyu Lintar Angin
- Dinner with an Owl
- Farlight 84
- Flatout 3
- KinitoPET
- Owl Observatory Demo
- Sleeping Dogs: Definitive Edition
- Super
- Sword of Convallaria
- Syberia
- THE KING OF FIGHTERS XIII STEAM EDITION
- To Pixelia Demo
- Unity of Command II
- Zaccaria Pinball
Pictured - Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora
- Fixed 9.0 regressions:
- Alan Wake's American Nightmare's DLC is playable again.
- Battlefield 1 is no longer failing to launch with Nvidia GPUs.
- Bionic Commando is playable again.
- Controllers work again in Sonic Forces.
- GRID Autosport and GRID 2 are playable again.
- Noita mods no longer fail to update.
- Warhammer 40,000: Darktide no longer freezes randomly when processing shaders for the cache.
- Improved language support for Guild Wars 2.
- Enable controller support in the launchers of Fallout 3 (standard and GOTY edition) via Xalia.
- Fixed cutscene playback in Iragon games.
- Fixed Yakuza Kiwami not working on certain setups.
- Added support for D3D12 in OpenXR.
- Fixed AVPro playback in VRChat.
- Fixed video quality of live streamed episodes in Quantum Break.
- Fixed artifacts in Yakuza 4 Remastered opening video.
- Improved support for workshop levels in Zeepkist.
- Improved loading time of Arcanum.
- Fixed Aimlabs having broken News section.
- Fixed RAID: World War II randomly hanging on start.
- Fixed Strip Fighter ZERO not starting on some setups.
- Fixed Undecember not being playable after a recent game update.
- Fixed missing cursor in IL-2 Sturmovik: Cliffs of Dover Blitz Edition.
- Fixed a crash in Starfield: Creation Kit.
- Fixed text not being displayed during the installation of EA Desktop launcher.
- Fixed "Customize Setup" not working during EA Launcher installation.
- Fixed Halo Infinite rendering using a weird resolution on a Steam Deck.
- Improved microphone support in Squad.
- Fixed License Agreement not displaying correctly in Romance of the Three Kingdoms [JP].
- Fixed FINAL FANTASY XII THE ZODIAC AGE displaying white screen on launch on Steam Deck OLED.
- Fixed microphone not working with Helldivers 2 after a recent game update.
- Fixed freezes in Dinogen Online.
- Fixed Dinogen Online crashing randomly on start.
- Fixed SCP Secret Laboratory crashing after a recent game update.
- Fixed Burnout Paradise Remastered crashing when an input video device is plugged in.
- Improved memory usage of Burnout Paradise Remastered and lowered the chances of crashing.
- Fixed font rendering in Insanely Twisted Shadow Planet.
- Fixed Knowledge, or know Lady crashing about 10 minutes after launch.
- Fixed Once Human crashing when trying to join a server or opening the EULA on fresh Proton prefixes.
- Fixed Ubisoft Connect requiring a manual log in with a new prefix with Far Cry 3 Blood Dragon (some other games may still suffer from that similarly as on Windows with a clean Ubisoft Connect install).
- Fixed The Finals not being playable after a recent game update.
- Fixed garbled videos in The Finals.
- Fixed video playback in Spirit Hunter: NG.
- Improved memory usage when playing videos in 32bit games.
- Fixed font rendering in Shady Brook - A Dark Mystery Text Adventure.
- Fixed Steam Deck users being forced to use MTL145 nickname in Project Kunai.
- Fixed connecting with Unreal Insights to games running under Proton.
- Added a warning that appears in Proton Log for systems that have low file descriptor limit (e.g. non-systemd distributions).
- Fixed video playback in One Finger Death Punch.
- Fixed Hell Yeah! Wrath of the Dead Rabbit crashing when reaching first boss.
- Updated Wine Mono to 9.2.0.
- Updated vkd3d-proton to v2.13-64-g47840a4bb614.
- Updated dxvk to v2.4-26-g02d8fa593b45.
- Updated dxvk-nvapi to v0.7.1-19-gbd542144518d.
How to test? Find Proton 9 in your Steam Library, go into the Properties and opt into the release-candidate beta branch.
See more in the GitHub post. Valve are only looking for bugs to be reported if they're new in Proton 9.0-3.
Did this fix something you've been waiting on? Or is there something specific you're hoping to see solved soon? Let me know in the comments.
Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.
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MekaDragon Aug 22
I love Proton, but there's something I don't quite understand about the development branches:
I thought Proton Experimental was the branch that had these, uh, experimental changes? Opting in a release candidate in the stable Proton version is a bit confusing.
In my head the development order is Proton Hotfix -> Proton Experimental -> Opting in a release candidate in a stable Proton version -> Stable Proton version.
Correct me if I'm wrong!
QuoteHow to test? Find Proton 9 in your Steam Library, go into the Properties and opt into the release-candidate beta branch.
I thought Proton Experimental was the branch that had these, uh, experimental changes? Opting in a release candidate in the stable Proton version is a bit confusing.
In my head the development order is Proton Hotfix -> Proton Experimental -> Opting in a release candidate in a stable Proton version -> Stable Proton version.
Correct me if I'm wrong!
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QuoteFixed video quality of live streamed episodes in Quantum Break.This was on my wishlist for quite a while, but the issues with their decision to stream parts of the game from the Internet meant that it never got bought and ultimately came off the wishlist. If it's fixed & working properly it might get on the wishlist again. Although - since the developers didn't care enough to fix it themselves and don't care enough to want the green tick - it'd still be waiting for a 90% discount.
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Quoting: MekaDragonIn my head the development order is Proton Hotfix -> Proton Experimental -> Opting in a release candidate in a stable Proton version -> Stable Proton version.Pretty much yes. As the article states, these changes were previously in Hotfix and Experimental, and now they're about to roll out to the main Proton version.
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TactikalKitty Aug 22
Honest Question: Why would you not use anything other than the Proton Experimental? Is there any real world use case that I would want to use the stable or and older proton version vs the up to date Experimental?
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Quoting: TactikalKittyHonest Question: Why would you not use anything other than the Proton Experimental? Is there any real world use case that I would want to use the stable or and older proton version vs the up to date Experimental?Experimental isn't "up to date." It's the janky first-pass attempts at fixes that haven't yet been tested. Once changes have actually been tested and shown to fix whatever issue (ideally without making anything else worse), they get put in stable.
Last edited by CatKiller on 22 August 2024 at 1:42 pm UTC
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Quoting: TactikalKittyHonest Question: Why would you not use anything other than the Proton Experimental? Is there any real world use case that I would want to use the stable or and older proton version vs the up to date Experimental?Adding to what CatKiller said, Proton Experimental often comes with its own regressions that break things. It's a constant moving thing, so telling people to run x game on Proton Experimental may work one day, break the next week and so on. Generally, you want to tell people it runs with a specific Proton version like 8, 9 or whatever so people have a set point where it works and should actually stay working.
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QuoteFixed Once Human crashing when trying to join a server or opening the EULA on fresh Proton prefixes.
But still no fixes for the black void on AMD ?
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Quoting: TactikalKittyHonest Question: Why would you not use anything other than the Proton Experimental? Is there any real world use case that I would want to use the stable or and older proton version vs the up to date Experimental?
I'm gonna say this as someone who actually ran Proton Experimental for months (and still do for certain games since they only work with them), it mostly won't matter, either Experimental will run that one game that Stable can't, or it'll be the same. But to make it clear: I play a wide range of games, old and recent, and I never had an issue due to a "regression" in Experimental.
I know this is all taboo talk, but this was just to honestly answer your question, based on actual real life experience.
Last edited by Pyrate on 22 August 2024 at 5:53 pm UTC
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Quoting: PyrateI'm gonna say this as someone who actually ran Proton Experimental for months (and still do for certain games since they only work with them), it mostly won't matter, either Experimental will run that one game that Stable can't, or it'll be the same. But to make it clear: I play a wide range of games, old and recent, and I never had an issue due to a "regression" in Experimental.I've been observing this conversation across a few recent news-threads now, and just had to speak up. I've generally stuck with Proton Experimental ever since I was a newbie to it - reason being, I didn't fully understand the purpose of having so many different versions at the time, and also didn't really have a reason to stick with any stable version because everything that I wanted to use either worked perfectly with Experimental or was visibly improving with it. I've only ever encountered one regression that stopped one game from booting, and that was about a year-and-a-half ago, and by that time I understood to set it to the right stable version for it. The rest of the time, it's been smooth sailing for me.
I know this is all taboo talk, but this was just to honestly answer your question, based on actual real life experience.
Having just done some testing with Proton Experimental with a game that was given a supposedly-stable-for-it version over a year ago, but still had consistent crashing issues relating to calling FMVs and then corrupting them and requiring an integrity-check to redownload the broken ones (just far less of them than had been the case prior), I can say that I can't personally always trust it when a previously-problematic game gets a particular Proton version to point at.
It won't surprise anyone that the game I was testing was Super Bomberman R; I've just done my first-ever Linux playthrough completely uninterrupted by crashes, which seems so novel to me at this point after how badly-behaved it's been with Proton over the years.
And just in case this is helpful to anyone in the future, you should actually use whatever the next stable Proton version is after the one that this article is about, not the one that Valve assigned to it (which was 8.0-5). Still, if not for this news-thread, I wouldn't have thought to double-check it with the current Experimental, and would've just accepted its state, because the Bomberman series' PC fanbase is tiny (it does millions on consoles, but hundreds to a few thousand at most on Steam - lucky me that they basically get the PC port for "free" due to the engine they use, or I'd be outta luck!) and I wouldn't expect fixing it to be anyone's priority. So, thanks for that guys. 
Last edited by Pengling on 22 August 2024 at 6:11 pm UTC
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thelimeydragon Aug 25
There are a lot of very obscure or little used games that you DO have to use older versions of wine/proton to get working because nobody is fixing whatever has changed to cause them to break in later versions.
That's why you need and it's good to be able to select older versions.
That's why you need and it's good to be able to select older versions.
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