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The developer of the interesting Proton Sarek project to help Linux gamers with older GPUs play more games has now forked DXVK, to hopefully improve things even further.

From the GitHub page:

This repository was created to support users with Vulkan capable GPUs that do not meet the 1.3 requirement of the current builds. My goal is to ensure that everyone can benefit from the nice performance of DXVK, even if their hardware is slightly older.

Additionally, this project is intended to be integrated into Proton Sarek. The main idea is to backport Quality of Life (QOL) patches and per game configurations from the latest versions to the 1.10.x branch.

Speaking over email, the developer told me "I've already backported and updated around 40 per game configurations, and a release should be available soon, around the start to mid December. This release will support both a standard DXVK and an Async version, with both integrated under Proton-Sarek."

Nice to see. While Valve continue pushing their official Proton forward, it often needs the most up to date drivers and the latest Vulkan support. So those of you with older GPUs can still benefit from getting a better experience and not being left behind thanks to Proton Sarek.

Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.
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6 comments

hardpenguin Nov 26
This dev is a hero, much needed project, cheers!
hm11 Nov 26
This is so cool! Happy to see that.
Caldathras Nov 26
This is great for those of us that prefer to game on older hardware.

It's wonderful that the dev saw this obvious need and decided to do something about it! Thanks, pythonlover02!!
WMan22 Nov 27
I have no personal need for this but I absolutely adore that it exists and can't praise it enough because it essentially fights e-waste and follows through on the premise of linux reviving old hardware beyond just making them web browsers, text doc editors, and media servers.

One thing I do wonder however is if this would have any performance gains with specific games even if you do have vulkan 1.3 compliant hardware.


Last edited by WMan22 on 27 November 2024 at 8:09 am UTC
FireBurn Nov 27
The project says without needing Vulkan 1.3, so which version of Vulkan are they targeting?

Of the x86 Vulkan drivers only hasvk isn't 1.3 - it's not even vulkan 1.0

If it's targeting the arm drivers it hasn't really said that either

I'm not sure who this is supposed to be helping
whizse Nov 27
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The project says without needing Vulkan 1.3, so which version of Vulkan are they targeting?

Of the x86 Vulkan drivers only hasvk isn't 1.3 - it's not even vulkan 1.0

If it's targeting the arm drivers it hasn't really said that either

I'm not sure who this is supposed to be helping
"On NVIDIA cards, it should be all the ones that are stuck on the 470 drivers, previous drivers like 440, 415, 390 and Nouveau users.

Intel && AMD:
Any GPU or iGPU that is OpenGL only or has a Vulkan API lower than 1.3."

From https://github.com/pythonlover02/Proton-Sarek?tab=readme-ov-file#gpu-list

At least on the AMD side, this would be 12+ years old GPUs.
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