Valve have announced the release of Steam Play Proton 4.11, this is a pretty exciting one and it's pretty huge overall.
Firstly, it was re-based on top of Wine 4.11. So it brings thousands of improvements over, considering that's quite a version bump. Additionally, 154 patches from Proton were upstreamed directly to Wine!
The next exciting bit is that Valve are now funding D9VK (and have been since June according to developer Joshua Ashton), along with shipping it in Proton as part of this update. This Vulkan-based Direct3D 9 renderer is still experimental, so it's not enabled by default as you need to use the "PROTON_USE_D9VK" setting.
Additionally DXVK was updated to 1.3, your current display refresh rate is now actually reported to games, there's more fixes to window management and mouse cursor focus, VR users rejoice as there's support for the latest OpenVR SDKs, FAudio was updated to 19.07, GameMaker titles got a fix for networking and there's a joystick input lag fix and rumble support for certain games.
Possibly just as exciting, is that a bunch of Wine "modules" are now built as Windows PE files instead of Linux libraries. Eventually, this will help some DRM and anti-cheat systems as work progresses on it. Fantastic to see work on that being done!
Is that all? Oh no—there's more.
When Valve identified issues with multi-threaded games as Proton development was being ramped up, CodeWeavers worked on developing the "esync" patchset to address it. It worked well but it came with multiple issues. As Valve said it needed a "special setup" and can cause "file descriptor exhaustion problems in event-hungry applications", they also think it "results in extraneous spinning in the kernel". So, they're working on what they're calling fsync and suggesting changes to accommodate it in the Linux Kernel.
Valve also showed off some proof-of-concept glibc patches, to expose the Kernel patches as part of the pthread library to get it all working. They said that if it's all accepted, "we would achieve efficiency gains by adopting it in native massively-threaded applications such as Steam and the Source 2 engine". You can read more about all that work in this Steam forum post and fsync testing instructions here.
As always, the Proton changelog for Steam Play can be found here.
Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.
Fortunately, the serious drops are rare and it's playable, but it's very annoying. Both in itself and because I can't figure it out. :/
Anyway, happy birthday, Liam. I never thought I'd think of 31 as “young”. :O
Koopacabras Jul 31, 2019
Last edited by Keyrock on 31 July 2019 at 4:58 pm UTC
Quoting: EagleDeltaQuoteWhen Valve identified issues with multi-threaded games as Proton development was being ramped up, CodeWeavers worked on developing the "esync" patchset to address it. It worked well but it came with multiple issues. As Valve said it needed a "special setup" and can cause "file descriptor exhaustion problems in event-hungry applications", they also think it "results in extraneous spinning in the kernel". So, they're working on what they're calling fsync and suggesting changes to accommodate it in the Linux Kernel.
That is awesome, though It's probably important to have everyone temper expectations for a stable version of fsync for a while. The kernel patches were submitted, but it will probably take some time to actually get those changes into the kernel, followed by even more time waiting for Desktop distros to update/patch their own kernels with the changes.
Still cool nonetheless
Yeah the patch to the kernel have already met some resistance on LKML and there are some strange things with it as well. The reason esync was a problem was the file descriptor limit that for some applications ranged to the millions but the fsync patches for the kernel can only handle 75k objects.
Comandante Ñoñardo Jul 31, 2019
Go to the PROTON 4.11 folder and open the file "proton"..
Go to this line:
dxvkfiles = ["d3d11", "d3d10", "d3d10core", "d3d10_1", "dxgi"]And add "d3d9" to that line as shown in the pic.
Before trying to run a game with this Proton version, make sure to delete the game shader cache that is located inside ..../steamapps/shadercache
Here, Life is Strange via forced PROTON 4.11
Quoting: liamdaweQuoting: EikeWhat I dislike about their post though is they used Shadow of the Tomb Raider as an example for Proton.Which is almost a year old and Feral don't seem to have mentioned it again since initially announcing it. How long is everyone supposed to wait?
One of the very, very few big games coming native to Linux...
Quoting: liamdaweQuoting: EikeWhat I dislike about their post though is they used Shadow of the Tomb Raider as an example for Proton.Which is almost a year old and Feral don't seem to have mentioned it again since initially announcing it. How long is everyone supposed to wait?
One of the very, very few big games coming native to Linux...
I would bet for exactly a year since release, thus until mid September. Just my gut feeling though ;)
Such a good release. This part caught my eye the most:
QuoteMany Wine modules are now built as Windows PE files instead of Linux libraries. As work in this area progresses, this will eventually help some DRM and anti-cheat systems. If you build Proton locally, you will likely need to re-create the Vagrant VM to build PE files.I wonder if the progress is in regards to EAC or/and Battleeye or anti cheat in general?
donbastiano Jul 31, 2019
Quoting: KeyrockOriginally I had mixed feelings about Proton, but I've come around on it. I'm in the if it runs via translation layer well enough that it's indistinguishable from native, then it's just as good as native camp. I've been playing HITMAN 2 via Proton and it runs AT LEAST as well as HITMAN runs natively.For me the real problem with Proton is that, obviously, you needs to install untrusted Microsoft things... a lot... (untrusted or things? ;) )
I'm still hoping that I can play, and buy, the native SotTR but the Feral's radar appears very static for Linux. It looks they're focusing more and more on mobile and the switch, I don't know, probably it makes sense. I'm still grateful for what they've done <3
Comandante Ñoñardo Jul 31, 2019
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