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Early this morning Valve officially rolled out a big update to the Steam Play whitelist, which indicates Windows games that work well with Steam Play's Proton.

Having titles in the whitelist, also means you don't need to go into Steam's settings and tick any extra boxes as they will just show up for everyone with the ability to install and play on Linux.

Sending out a Twitter post to announced it, Valve's Pierre-Loup Griffais announced "Just pushed a Steam Play whitelist update to reflect current testing results" with a link to SteamDB which helps track it all down.

The list is reasonably long, some notable titles include:

  • Castle Crashers
  • The Witness
  • Wolfenstein: The Old Blood
  • Overcooked
  • Guacamelee! 2

It's going to be interesting to see how Valve eventually show support for Steam Play directly on Steam store pages, that's the next step that I'm looking forward to.

A pretty exciting start to a weekend wouldn't you say?

Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.
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83 comments
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YoRHa-2B Oct 7, 2018
Running a 396-series driver isn't a bad idea for Feral's ports either, they basically replaced the entire shader compiler. Might give a performance boost here and there.

And for DXVK it's a hard requirement.
x4mer Oct 7, 2018
Quoting: SalvatosI'm kind of in the same boat. I'm on Mint, but it's only offering me 340.107 and 390.48 so I'd rather stick to that. Didn't someone say that the newer drivers were only necessary for Vulkan games anyway, or something along those lines?

Once you're using Steamplay Proton or Wine/DXVK though, then even non Vulkan games are having their DirectX calls converted to Vulkan. As far as the display driver is concerned, games having API translation done are all Vulkan games. Running the later drivers ensures you have a more robust and bugfixed interface accepting the Vulkan calls.


Last edited by x4mer on 7 October 2018 at 7:03 pm UTC
tuubi Oct 7, 2018
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Quoting: Salvatos
Quoting: g000hI'm a long term Debian user, and I use it properly... i.e. I install the packages from the regular repositories so that my system doesn't get messed up. I have tried backports and all sorts of things in the past, but generally find that forcing a later graphics driver onto the system ends up borking it.
I'm kind of in the same boat. I'm on Mint, but it's only offering me 340.107 and 390.48 so I'd rather stick to that. Didn't someone say that the newer drivers were only necessary for Vulkan games anyway, or something along those lines?
On Mint or Ubuntu there's no good reason not to use the semi-official graphics drivers PPA maintained by Ubuntu staff. There's also the development PPA for beta drivers with more up-to-date Vulkan support. Valve officially recommends the former in their Proton prerequisites document.
jarhead_h Oct 7, 2018
Quoting: Solitary
Quoting: Cyba.CowboySo in other words, if you're not a Sam & Max fan, it's actually a pretty small list.

Strange, considering there's apparently a lot more games which have complete "platinum" results... I would have thought that many of those would be added to the "whitelist" in the next update.

I think it's obvious that they are not whitelisting just because someone somewhere says it's good enough. SPCR list has its limits, often not fully tested and it's opinion-based rather than factual. Valve is most likely doing proper QA on their own and it takes time.

Very likely. For example, I just played through Alan Wake again. It was getting Platinum ratings. I tried it, and while it worked there were pretty noticeable problems. It likes to crash. Enabling any AA at all turned the grass into blocks. There were constant graphical glitches. I finished the game, and The Signal tack-on episodes, and as much as I like the game there's no way it should be white-listed. White-listing should be reserved purely for games that "just-work" on the majority of major distros like Ubuntu, Fedora, Manjaro, etc, without any need for special launch options or non-working graphical features.

Quoting: Salvatos
Quoting: g000hI'm a long term Debian user, and I use it properly... i.e. I install the packages from the regular repositories so that my system doesn't get messed up. I have tried backports and all sorts of things in the past, but generally find that forcing a later graphics driver onto the system ends up borking it.
I'm kind of in the same boat. I'm on Mint, but it's only offering me 340.107 and 390.48 so I'd rather stick to that. Didn't someone say that the newer drivers were only necessary for Vulkan games anyway, or something along those lines?

I'm on Fedora 28, and I really think that has helped me in this case because it's a royal pain to set up Fedora for proprietary drivers, and those are the only drivers worth using with a newer NVIDIA card.

https://www.if-not-true-then-false.com/2015/fedora-nvidia-guide/

I'm running 396.54.06, pretty much just because why not? This guide only has to be followed once. Once you've blacklisted and removed Noveau changing to newer NVIDIA drivers is easy. You really should be familiar with VIM to do so, though. I don't know how this translates to a debian based distro like Mint or Ubuntu because I know that they both handle graphics drivers in the gui.

Recommend this : https://www.openvim.com/


Last edited by jarhead_h on 7 October 2018 at 8:08 pm UTC
Leopard Oct 7, 2018
Quoting: Salvatos
Quoting: g000hI'm a long term Debian user, and I use it properly... i.e. I install the packages from the regular repositories so that my system doesn't get messed up. I have tried backports and all sorts of things in the past, but generally find that forcing a later graphics driver onto the system ends up borking it.
I'm kind of in the same boat. I'm on Mint, but it's only offering me 340.107 and 390.48 so I'd rather stick to that. Didn't someone say that the newer drivers were only necessary for Vulkan games anyway, or something along those lines?

I'm on Mint too but i'm using 396.54.05. Didn't cause me so much trouble.

New drivers are needed for DXVK's sake in general which also affects SteamPlay.

Just add graphics ppa and you're ready to install driver via gui.
Nanobang Oct 8, 2018
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Is there a second official Steam Whitelist somewhere besides the original one? Or are they just not bothering to update their whitelist. I mean, it's nice that they linked the steamdb changes, but why wouldn't they update their own list proper and just use that? Am I missing something?

This niggle aside, it IS good to see evidence that the Steam crew are testing games.
somebody1121 Oct 8, 2018
I tried "the old blood" and steel doesn't work on stable mesa drivers, the patch for expose the ARB_vertex_buffer_object in core profile isn't in yet, so why they have whitelisted it?
m2mg2 Oct 8, 2018
[quote=jarhead_h][quote=Solitary]
Quoting: Cyba.CowboySo in other words, if you're not a Sam & Max fan, it's actually a pretty small list.


I'm on Fedora 28, and I really think that has helped me in this case because it's a royal pain to set up Fedora for proprietary drivers, and those are the only drivers worth using with a newer NVIDIA card.

https://www.if-not-true-then-false.com/2015/fedora-nvidia-guide/

I'm running 396.54.06, pretty much just because why not? This guide only has to be followed once. Once you've blacklisted and removed Noveau changing to newer NVIDIA drivers is easy. You really should be familiar with VIM to do so, though. I don't know how this translates to a debian based distro like Mint or Ubuntu because I know that they both handle graphics drivers in the gui.

Recommend this : https://www.openvim.com/

https://negativo17.org/nvidia-driver/

The only recent time I had to compile a Nvidia driver was on a system that with GTX 465. The newest drivers don't support the card, the 340 driver was the only version I could find in the repo. I had to download the 390.87 driver from Nvidia so I could get vulkan support
Purple Library Guy Oct 8, 2018
Quoting: Hori
Quoting: Guest
Quoting: elmapulso...
they ignored our list
https://spcr.netlify.com/needs-testing
and they are going with steamdb list instead?

If it is the case, it is a pity

Quoting: HoriQuestion: Does buying them now count as a Linux or Windows sale?
They don't have the Linux icon yet.

They explicitly said it counted as a Linux sale. :)

All I could find was "Steam Play whitelisted games will not be offered for purchase or marked as supported on Linux on the Store during the initial Beta period." in the initial announcement - which to me it only says about the icon's appearance but not whether it counts as a Linux sale or not.

Is there any other place where they discussed about this?
In terms of places you can go look, not sure. What we know is that Liam asked if games played on Proton counted as Linux sales and they told him unequivocally that yes they were and so he reported the news to we lucky GamingOnLinux fans.


Last edited by Purple Library Guy on 8 October 2018 at 5:01 pm UTC
Purple Library Guy Oct 8, 2018
It does occur to me that while it's nice that the Whitelist is growing, it's probably adding games slower than new games are being published on Steam . . .
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