Support us on Patreon to keep GamingOnLinux alive. This ensures all of our main content remains free for everyone. Just good, fresh content! Alternatively, you can donate through PayPal. You can also buy games using our partner links for GOG and Humble Store.
We do often include affiliate links to earn us some pennies. See more here.

It seems NVIDIA have been working on some improvements to their Linux driver, as the 396.54.05 beta driver seems to have improved performance in various games.

Tweeting about it, Valve's Pierre-Loup Griffais said "Proton NVIDIA users: the latest 396.54.05 Vulkan Beta driver contains significant performance improvements in GPU-bound scenarios.". He also noted that those on Ubuntu can grab it from a different PPA provided by Canonical for easy installation.

Looking around, it seems he's right on the money. Talking about it in our forum (also reddit), users noted improvements to games run on Linux. The improvements look pretty impressive too. The focus of everyone's testing seems to be DXVK which benefits from the new driver, so I went to test.

I was going to try out DOOM this morning, to see if there were any improvements there myself, but sadly the latest Proton update has actually made it unplayable for me when using two monitors (issue report). A shame, because it was basically perfection on the initial release of Proton from Valve's Steam Play. A good case for not simply moving everyone onto the latest version, keeping older versions around for when they do work fine. Edit: As mentioned in our comments, DOOM is not a good test case anyway, I simply don't own enough Windows games currently to test such stuff, but I'm working on acquiring more for such testing.

Instead, I took a look at Rise of the Tomb Raider and F1 2017 two native Linux games with Vulkan but it gave practically no difference. Edit: As mentioned by the DXVK developer in our first comments, the driver update will mainly benefit DXVK (for now) anyway.

So for those of you who are playing games (when they work) with Steam Play, this driver should hopefully improve things for you.

Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.
19 Likes
About the author -
author picture
I am the owner of GamingOnLinux. After discovering Linux back in the days of Mandrake in 2003, I constantly came back to check on the progress of Linux until Ubuntu appeared on the scene and it helped me to really love it. You can reach me easily by emailing GamingOnLinux directly. Find me on Mastodon.
See more from me
The comments on this article are closed.
29 comments
Page: «3/3
  Go to:

kokoko3k Sep 17, 2018
Just tested Hitman 2016.
This time Feral wins; fps at start of the very first mission are 56 for native version, and only 38..39 for wine/DXVK
scaine Sep 17, 2018
View PC info
  • Contributing Editor
  • Mega Supporter
Quoting: kokoko3kJust tested Hitman 2016.
This time Feral wins; fps at start of the very first mission are 56 for native version, and only 38..39 for wine/DXVK

What card are you using? You profile only lists "Nvidia", but not the model. I got so-so performance on (native) Hitman on my old GTX 670 (roughly equivalent to a GTX1060), to the point that I gave up playing it.

I have a 1080 now and really should try getting into this again.
kokoko3k Sep 17, 2018
Quoting: scaineWhat card are you using? You profile only lists "Nvidia", but not the model. I got so-so performance on (native) Hitman on my old GTX 670 (roughly equivalent to a GTX1060), to the point that I gave up playing it.

I have a 1080 now and really should try getting into this again.
Wrote in the post about grid autosport:
Quoting: kokoko3kCPU:Intel(R) Core(TM) i5-4590 CPU @ 3.30GHz
GPU:GeForce GTX 750 Ti 2GB
RAM:16GB

Anyhow, the settings i tested it were quite low, i don't play hitman due to performance reasons too.

-EDIT-
Are you sure gtx1060 is equivalent to gtx670? In benchmark it seems gtx1060 is on par with gtx980 (non ti).


Last edited by kokoko3k on 17 September 2018 at 3:52 pm UTC
scaine Sep 17, 2018
View PC info
  • Contributing Editor
  • Mega Supporter
Hmmm, I was doing that cparison from memory, so I might very well be wrong. The old GTX670 was unusually powerful for its time, but couldn't quite keep up with a 970, let alone a 980! I must have misremembered! Still, my 1080 should eat Hitman up. I'll give it another go.
evergreen Sep 17, 2018
I tested Assetto Corsa Competizione, but no benefits in fps. The game runs as same as the stable drivers.
baccilus Sep 18, 2018
Quoting: XpanderGTA V on the other hand went from 70-90fps to 90-110FPS in the GPU bound situations (which are the most situations for me with 2560x1440) and the GPU utilization is now a bit lower also, around 90% while it was constantly 100% before

Is there anything special I need to do to get GTA V to work with Steam Play? It doesn't have great rating at the SPCR website. I have a GTX 1060 6GB card with Intel 2500K and 24GB RAM. I don't want to download such a big game to find out that it doesn't work. I am only interested in the Single player.
jarhead_h Sep 19, 2018
Just switched over. The only game I have on the system right now is Alan Wake. Just finished DOOM and deleted it. Any other suggestions?
m2mg2 Sep 19, 2018
Quoting: baccilus
Quoting: XpanderGTA V on the other hand went from 70-90fps to 90-110FPS in the GPU bound situations (which are the most situations for me with 2560x1440) and the GPU utilization is now a bit lower also, around 90% while it was constantly 100% before

Is there anything special I need to do to get GTA V to work with Steam Play? It doesn't have great rating at the SPCR website. I have a GTX 1060 6GB card with Intel 2500K and 24GB RAM. I don't want to download such a big game to find out that it doesn't work. I am only interested in the Single player.

It works but takes some tinkering. You need ms fonts (either in your distro or in wine/proton through winetricks), a special dxvk config option and set msdmo to builtin (with winecfg).

https://github.com/ValveSoftware/Proton/issues/37#issuecomment-420495098

I'm about 30% through the game, plays great. You can get by without the msdmo fix for single player but you have to pass on offline only option to the game or the social club hangs.
m2mg2 Sep 29, 2018
Quoting: Guest
Quoting: FredO
Quoting: Guesthttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KxgACrsM-Yo&t=511s

i tested this on the older drivers but will test again on the new drivers.only downside is i have a gtx 970,i no longer have a 980ti.

What happened to your 980ti? My one literally went up in smoke after just 3 years of use. Very disappointing.

i had to sell mine needed the money,thankfully i had a 970 laying around.

A few years back we had three Nvidia's in a row that died within 3 years. Two got replaced once under warranty so it was really 5. One other had a fan go out, that I replaced myself. I almost swore off Nvidia all together, but the next ones were good. I've got a 465 running that is about 5 years old and my 980 is I think a little over 3.
While you're here, please consider supporting GamingOnLinux on:

Reward Tiers: Patreon. Plain Donations: PayPal.

This ensures all of our main content remains totally free for everyone! Patreon supporters can also remove all adverts and sponsors! Supporting us helps bring good, fresh content. Without your continued support, we simply could not continue!

You can find even more ways to support us on this dedicated page any time. If you already are, thank you!
The comments on this article are closed.