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Two vital open source projects for the Steam Deck had new releases today, with the DXVK and VKD3D-Proton layers that translate Direct3D / DirectX to Vulkan.

With these two, Proton that runs Windows games on the Steam Deck and Linux desktops should see some nice improvements with a future release. I won't go over all the changes, as it's aimed at quite a technical audience but for us regular users here's a few highlights.

Some of what you can expect to see thanks to DXVK 1.10 include better performance for Assassin's Creed: Origins, Elex II, God of War, GTA IV, Quantum Break, Resident Evil 0, 5, 6, Resident Evil: Revelations 2, Total War: Warhammer III and others. There's also a few bug fixes for specific games like Arma 2 fixing texture issues and Black Mesa lighting issues.

Over on VKD3D-Proton 2.6 you can expect to see a fix for a black screen rendering bug in Horizon Zero Dawn, a startup crash fix for Final Fantasy VII: Remake and Warframe, multiple crash fixes for Guardians of the Galaxy when interacting with certain game objects, Elden Ring shouldn't hang on shutdown and broken geometry rendering in Age of Empires: IV.

Other VKD3D-Proton improvements reduce loading times in Monster Hunter: Rise, Guardian of the Galaxy and Elden Ring. There's also a workaround for DEATHLOOP menu flicker on the AMD RADV driver, a workaround for "quirky API usage" in Elden Ring, sorts out glitching foliage in Horizon Zero Dawn and another workaround to help "some questionable UE4 shaders".

Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.
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8 comments

scaine Mar 5, 2022
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Gotta admit, I'm sat here gobsmacked that someone thought Elex was decent enough to warrant a sequel.

That's all I got from reading this. Damn.

p.s. awesome news about the underlying tech that powers Linux gaming....
Raaben Mar 5, 2022
Quoting: scaineGotta admit, I'm sat here gobsmacked that someone thought Elex was decent enough to warrant a sequel.

That's all I got from reading this. Damn.

Hey now, there are dozens of us that live for Eurojank like this.

That said, PB's earlier work was much better. Their games still do manage scratch a certain itch. Haven't picked up Elex 2 yet to judge though.
F.Ultra Mar 5, 2022
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Quoting: scaineGotta admit, I'm sat here gobsmacked that someone thought Elex was decent enough to warrant a sequel.

That's all I got from reading this. Damn.

p.s. awesome news about the underlying tech that powers Linux gaming....

Apparently ELEX made over 100k sales in Germany alone the first year.
YoRHa-2B Mar 5, 2022
Quoting: RaabenHaven't picked up Elex 2 yet to judge though.
Haven't really played it much since I only got my hands on it to test it with DXVK anyway, but:
- the way the camera zooms in and out all the time is seriously annoying and can't be configured, if you have issues with motion sickness you probably won't have a good time here
- from a technical PoV this game is a complete trainwreck, it has visual glitches that happen even on Windows, and while my 5950X + 6900XT just manage to keep the game above 60 FPS at 1440p in most places, don't expect that to be the case on your hardware.
Add to that issues with the game sometimes getting stuck on the loading screen before the menu, not shutting down properly, getting stuck on the loading screen while loading a save, and all sorts of other fun problems.

And it's not like Proton/RADV are having issues here, on Windows the game runs into so many AMD driver problems that the game is pretty much unplayable on this machine.

QuoteElex was decent enough
I'd argue that Elex was actually decent, yeah it had some typical Piranha Bytes problems (combat...) but I did quite like it.


Last edited by YoRHa-2B on 5 March 2022 at 4:49 am UTC
furaxhornyx Mar 5, 2022
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+1 for Elex, I enjoyed the game during all of my 3 playthroughs (Elex II is of course on my wishlist)
But then again, I know I tend to have a little something for games that are "out of tracks"...
Raaben Mar 5, 2022
Quoting: YoRHa-2BHaven't really played it much since I only got my hands on it to test it with DXVK anyway, but:
- the way the camera zooms in and out all the time is seriously annoying and can't be configured, if you have issues with motion sickness you probably won't have a good time here
- from a technical PoV this game is a complete trainwreck, it has visual glitches that happen even on Windows, and while my 5950X + 6900XT just manage to keep the game above 60 FPS at 1440p in most places, don't expect that to be the case on your hardware.
Add to that issues with the game sometimes getting stuck on the loading screen before the menu, not shutting down properly, getting stuck on the loading screen while loading a save, and all sorts of other fun problems.

And it's not like Proton/RADV are having issues here, on Windows the game runs into so many AMD driver problems that the game is pretty much unplayable on this machine.

That makes me sad. Generally I always found PB games quite stable/glitch free and decently performant on release (not shown: Gothic 3). Now I'm doubting more that my machine would even run it period. I played through all of Elex 1 day one and had no issues except one instance of a quest trigger failing that I had to restart. That seemed to be one of the pluses for them sticking with their dated engine. Guess I'll keep this one on the wishlist for a bit then and hope.
TheRiddick Mar 7, 2022
ELEX was fun, but I only got 90% of the way through it before I accidentally deleted my saves. I've just started ELEX-2 and am enjoying that, I already know most the ending of ELEX-1 anyway so not big loss.

I will say that ELEX-2 does have performance issues in area's such as The Fort and other bigger towns. Kind of wish they included FSR and DLSS options for the game or moved to DX12 (vulkan even) but it seems they mostly just updated ELEX-1 engine and stayed on DX11.

I know Piranha Bytes takes a LONG TIME to transition into new engine tech. Same issue happened with their Gothic and Risen games. They were fun and had the game-play mostly down (with jank) bu the underlying engine tech was a few years behind the rest of the world.
StalePopcorn Apr 3, 2022
What I don't understand is [to] what version(s) of Proton does this (currently) apply?


Last edited by StalePopcorn on 3 April 2022 at 3:01 am UTC
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