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Another exciting set of changes for Valve's new Steam Play system. This time the Proton beta 3.16-4 includes some really good stuff. If you don't see it show up, restart Steam.

Here's what's changed:

  • Proton now ships with corefonts support. This should fix many games with missing text, or that crash due to missing font support.
  • Significant Steamworks compatibility improvements. This should fix SOULCALIBUR VI's network failure when launched through Steam Play.
  • For Direct3D games (both DXVK and wined3d), Nvidia cards are now reported as if they are actually AMD cards. This prevents games from trying to load the Windows-only nvapi library and crashing or giving very bad performance.
  • Mouse focus and clipping improvements.
  • Upgrade OpenVR SDK support.
  • Fix for a keyboard input issue in S.T.A.L.K.E.R. games.

See the full changelog here, as a reminder the changelog moved from a file in the repo to GitHub's Wiki system.

It's really great to see the Steamworks fix which caused some issues for people. Hopefully there won't be too many hidden gotchas like that buried in it but only time will tell as more people try out Steam Play. I was also hoping Valve would do something about corefonts, since it was an issue in quite a number of games and a barrier for seamless play. For corefonts, they're not using the actual MSFT fonts, instead they're using liberation-fonts as seen from this commit.

As a reminder, Steam Play needs a driver version of 396.54 or newer at a minimum for NVIDIA and AMD ideally Mesa 18.2. For Transform Feedback support from DXVK you need the 396.54.09 Vulkan Beta Driver on NVIDIA and Mesa git for AMD, this fixes missing models in a bunch of DX11 games.

What I'm looking forward to now are Valve finding a way to deal with all those zero-byte updates and seeing how they advertise Steam Play on store pages. On top of that, what I'm also curious about is how Valve will move forwards with updates to their whitelist, it would be interesting if they had a way to notify you if a game on your wishlist gained "official" Steam Play support.

If you have issues with games not working correctly with Steam Play, do ensure you make a bug report on GitHub to help Valve and co improve the system.

Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.
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bubexel Nov 1, 2018
Quoting: Shmerl
Quoting: Scoopta
Quoting: loggeHaha, now Nvidia gets their parts of being closed-source only! What a day!
I'm not sure what exactly you were trying to say but it sounds sort of like a dig on Nvidia yet you have an nvidia card?

Nvidia cards are reported as AMD cards now, so Nvidia usage will plummet in Steam stats. Thanks to Nvidia pushing their lock-in APIs.

I don't think so, Steam stats reports comes from steam client not from games running on proton.
QuoteWhat I'm looking forward to now are Valve finding a way to deal with all those zero-byte updates
What is up with those? I figured that it was just small and rounded down to zero, rather than actually zero. However, Valdis has been doing almost one of these a day for over a week now. I don't mind if they are actually fixing things, but some kind of changelog would be nice.
Corben Nov 1, 2018
QuoteFor Transform Feedback support from DXVK you need the 396.54.09 Vulkan Beta Driver on NVIDIA
Is there a benefit going with the 410 series drivers?
D34VA_ Nov 1, 2018
Quoting: Corben
QuoteFor Transform Feedback support from DXVK you need the 396.54.09 Vulkan Beta Driver on NVIDIA
Is there a benefit going with the 410 series drivers?

Currently, no. As of yet, the 4XX drivers do not support VK_EXT_Transform_Feedback, as far as I know.


Last edited by D34VA_ on 1 November 2018 at 3:00 am UTC
anarchist_tomato Nov 1, 2018
I'll be interested to test against the font changes and the AMD/Nvidia workaround. Mirror's Edge may improve with the latter?

My chief concern is fixing that mouse problem that's been in Wine since forever and is still in Proton, where you're in an FPS and can suddenly only turn about 270 degrees. I usually fix it by exiting into the game menu and going into the controls menu and then back into the game. That *should* be gone from Wine/Proton though now, it's been decades!
mylka Nov 1, 2018
Quoting: Comandante Ñoñardo
QuoteWhat I'm looking forward to now are Valve finding a way to deal with all those zero-byte updates and seeing how they advertise Steam Play on store pages.

I wonder that too...
And I am curious about their actual whitelist process.

Is good to see life signs from Proton devs after two weeks.

i wonder why it takes so much time to whitelist games. on protondb they have 1000 of tests
witcher 3 has less borked entries, than the whitelisted doom or tekken
valve should test all games on the www.protondb.com frontsite and whitelist it
or at least newer games like shadow of the tomb raider, prey, kingdom come, wolfenstein. i think it would really help, if the can advertise with new AAA titles

nier was a good start, but who needs bejeweld, fieldrunner, cats go fishing,....


Last edited by mylka on 1 November 2018 at 4:41 am UTC
ghiuma Nov 1, 2018
Unfortunately elex crashes when I turn on the xbox360 controller, the keyboard works great, you know a way to avoid the crash...
silly Nov 1, 2018
Skyrim (legacy edition) now works with mods from Workshop.
mao_dze_dun Nov 1, 2018
So, the big things that are ahead are fixing .NET problems, i.e. being able to install recent versions and the sound problems in Fallout 4, Skyrim etc. I think the first one should be solved by upgrading the wine version they use and the second will hopefully be fixed by Ethan soon.

Also it'd be great if they can squeeze even more performance in, but I think they've about reached the limit of something like 90% of windows performance. So I guess consistent 90% would be the final goal.

And then, they need to solve the anti-cheat problem. Which is probably the biggest mountain to climb, but unless you have the big multiplayer titles (even the ones not on Steam), you're not going anywhere.
officernice Nov 1, 2018
@liamdawe Have you heard anything new regarding 64-bit support for Steam? Sorry to derail the train, it just popped into my head! :)
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