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anit-cheat and steam deck
ExpandingMan Feb 25, 2022
Perhaps I am reading too much into this, but I find the fact that the anti-cheat for Elden Ring supposedly works on steamdeck but must be bypassed on all other systems rather alarming.

I should caveat what I'm saying by noting that Elden Ring actually works really well for me (of course I had to bypass the anti-cheat and can only use offline mode). I get a very solid 60 f/s (it appears to be capped) on my RTX2080S with only very rare stuttering (which is probably mostly from shader compilation and will therefore likely go away).

Anyway, the reason I find this worrying is because here we have an example of most linux systems not benefiting from valve's push for steamdeck. Does this imply that anti-cheat will make special accommodations for steamdeck that we will routinely not benefit from on other systems as seems to have happened here? Speculating further, could this mean an eventual "decoupling" of steamdeck from linux gaming generally because now you have a bunch of games that only work on steamdeck, so why bother making things work on other systems?

On a technical front, it seems a little odd that this should be possible at all (which makes me suspect shenanigans; in this case I have heard that they have a separate version of elden ring for steamdeck). I assume that anti-cheat works by checksumming binaries that it links to, which would make it extremely difficult to circumvent reliably. Another possibility is that it is making system calls to try to infer what system it's running on, but this seems much easier because wine already has to emulate these (though if games start expecting specific systems e.g. steamdeck it might present other problems).

Hopefully I'm reading too much into this: for all I know steam experimental is just a bit behind and on the next patch elden ring will work as expected, but it certainly got me paranoid about bad implications for linux gaming.
denyasis Feb 25, 2022
If I may:

Quoting: ExpandingManPerhaps I am reading too much into this, but I find the fact that the anti-cheat for Elden Ring supposedly works on steamdeck but must be bypassed on all other systems rather alarming

From the comments in the thread, it works on some of the other distros, just not universally.

I don't think we are to the point where Deck does not equate Linux support and while SteamOS could become the preferred target distro for Linux, I don't think this means all other distros will be blocked. It's really no different than it it currently is.
Liam Dawe Feb 26, 2022
It is supposed to work. The thing is Proton is not different between Steam Deck and Linux desktop, it's literally the same. There's a *bug* where for some (me included) the current implementation with the new EAC runtime doesn't load - it's not intentional. Epic is looking into it.
pete910 Mar 5, 2022
Quoting: Liam DaweIt is supposed to work. The thing is Proton is not different between Steam Deck and Linux desktop, it's literally the same. There's a *bug* where for some (me included) the current implementation with the new EAC runtime doesn't load - it's not intentional. Epic is looking into it.

Wonder if that's the issue I have with sandstorm as others are running it fine but for me it does not. Times out on EAC for me.
Liam Dawe Mar 5, 2022
Quoting: pete910
Quoting: Liam DaweIt is supposed to work. The thing is Proton is not different between Steam Deck and Linux desktop, it's literally the same. There's a *bug* where for some (me included) the current implementation with the new EAC runtime doesn't load - it's not intentional. Epic is looking into it.

Wonder if that's the issue I have with sandstorm as others are running it fine but for me it does not. Times out on EAC for me.
Unsure but I saw a Valve developer clearly say EAC not loading for some on desktop is not intentional.
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