ProtonDB creator here and solo dev (with a huge hat tip to the tens of thousands writing reports). It's been a wild three and a half years keeping this ship sailing. Happy to answer questions.
Thanks for working on ProtonDB, it's such an invaluable resource. Here's their Patreon if anybody is interested in supporting the project: https://www.patreon.com/protondb
This nonsense is very similar to another weird account that has been posting recently, obsessed with TPM and multiplayer logic being stolen from old school MMOs.
ProtonDB has been such an asset (thank you!), I'm often surprised Valve hasn't integrated it into the Linux steam client or at least included a link to the relevant entry. So... why haven't they?
Thank you for working on this! Maybe this is not your area of expertise, but I'm interested in the performance differences between native DirectX performance and going through Vulkan abstraction layers like DXVK. If you're a company designing GPUs that has a Vulkan driver already but would need significant time and effort developing DirectX drivers, is DXVK et. al. a viable alternative?
Just wanted to say thank you. Been using ProtonDB extensively lately to find more titles which may be a great fit for my recent migration from Windows towards Linux. Hope I can contribute one day either with the list of games or in any way with the site.
Valve has recognized this is a threat to the success of the Steam Deck and helped Proton support at least two prominent anti-cheat tools (EAC and BattlEye). But it remains to be seen if we'll see widespread acceptance from developers. Fortnite in particular has come out that they won't enable it. Free-to-play games have a more sensitive threat perception.
It's a lot more granular than that, unfortunately. WINE and Linux natively support a plethora of anticheat engines, but the developers have to opt-in to allowing Linux players to use it. Bungie, for example, has recently confirmed that they won't be activating Linux support in their current plans. EA, on the other hand, just allowed Apex Legends players on Linux to start playing today (having played a couple hours, I can confirm it runs much better than on Windows).
It's really just a matter of developers opting-in. Rainbow Six Siege is one of the big ones I'd keep an eye out for next; Ubisoft has been teasing the community forums with official Linux questionnaires and RFCs for months now. Fingers crossed!
But I think I would be ok with a device dedicated to gaming having anti-cheat. Not because I trust it, but because there's nothing on that device I need to trust it with. Except maybe my account login and network access.
We knew our windows version wasn't going to work with proton so we made a native linux version that works on steamos.
Sadly we remain listed as Unsupported on steamdeck as it seems to really want to use the broken windows version through proton instead of the working linux native version.
This is a minority situation but an important one for the exceptions. Under the shadow of the rise of Proton it's getting harder to surface that sometimes you want to force Steam to use the native version. Something something the turn tables.
I recently changed the report questions to allow specifying 'Native. No Proton' as an an answer to 'Which Proton do you use'. It's gotten a few grumbles ('this is a site for Proton') but I think it's worth doing for cases like yours. Given enough samples, the site will be able to highlight games that have a significant amount of users preferring native over Proton for some games and I think it'll be a curious enough set to warrant its own filter or highlight section.
Thanks for describing your case. I've linked to it in my todo notes to keep in mind.
One quick "just make it work" solution might be to ship Linux binaries with the Windows version, check if you're on wine, then execute the Linux binaries via an exec syscall[1]. I'd imagine the bulk of the game is going to be assets not code so that (maybe?) wouldn't make the game too much larger.
Ah; they've added questions specific to steam deck, like battery impact. That makes more sense - I was confused why it would be any different than any other machine using Proton.
That would be incredibly unpleasant for a text heavy game. Valve has standards for this:
"text legibility: interface text must be easily readable at a distance of 12 inches/30 cm from the screen. In other words, the smallest on-screen font character should never fall below 9 pixels in height at 1280x800...we recommend aiming for 12px whenever possible.)"
I've been complaining about small text in games since the beginning of the HD era in my early 20s. It's gotten better, but I'm baffled that it's still a problem in many modern games.
I play a lot of older games, and have to lower my displsy resolution to get a usable font size in many of them (from native 4K down to 1920x1080 most of the time).
It's probably fine for English, because it has only 26 characters with simple stroke. But for CJK, it will be a real problem. Some characters like 病, 歸 hava far more horizontal/vertical lines compare to English characters. 12px is already bad, 10px/8px will be totally unreadable.
Fun fact: windows actually have different font size in setting page depends on which language you are using. For most Western languages, it is 12/10, but for cjk, it is 14.
Not completely unplayable, but I distinctly remember the first Dead Rising on Xbox 360 having completely illegible text on CRT displays[0]. No amount of squinting harder could have fixed that.
Probably! In that sense, this may be the first time anyone has attempted to maintain a large index of games by power consumpion.
I do find it somewhat amusing that the existence of the Deck inadvertently creates a universal benchmark. I wonder how useful that data will prove to be over time as units age and new SKUs are released?
I watched a video earlier today that touched on this, and suggested that the amount of metrics and data that Valve is allowing folks to pull out of their Steam Decks will 100% be useful when the Deck 2.0 comes out because we'll all be able to see real-world benchmarks on how it compares to the previous unit, for a lot more use-cases and types of games.
Agreed - the Steam Deck's "Game Scope" performance overlay that toggles straight from the quick menu button has been enabled in almost every single video of the Deck running I've seen.
Having an awesome performance overlay available from day one that was so easy to toggle has meant virtually all Deck videos have the benchmark data burned into them, making finding real-world comparable results from the new "universal baseline" surprisingly easy to do just watching youtube. When Deck 2 rolls, we will all be used to the Game Scope benchmark overlay format too.
Yes absolutely, but it’s typically harder to measure for laptop users and will vary a lot based on laptop hardware.
On the Steam Deck, every device has the same hardware, and Valve even puts an (optional) display in the top left corner of the screen to show the device’s current power draw in watts, which makes it a lot easier to make meaningful comparisons between games!
Depends a lot on components, for example, the Steam Deck only has 4 physical cores, a laptop might have more and that is ignoring if you have a different architecture than Zen 2.
You can do a lot to optimize the battery life on a Steam Deck, but it also does a few things automatically, which a laptop doesn't (like capping framerate in a very efficient way).
it probably would, but still more useful to steam deck users since battery usage can be dependent on hardware (and drivers for that hardware) specific to the deck.
Amongst other reasons, lack of support for anti-cheat systems (like EAC and BattleEye) have stopped big-name games like Destiny 2, Fortnite and others from easily porting to Linux. The Steam Deck has started to change that, prompting the ecosystem to slowly come around.
Whenever I ask online about linux gaming a lot of people say that they have better or equal performance on linux than on windows. My experience does not replicate that. My theory so far is that people that have better or equal performance on linux have powerful machines.
For instance, my GPU have low DRAM and it's on a laptop, I got a solid 60 fps Dark Souls III on Windows, whereas I face 50 ~ 30 fps on linux with micro stutters every now and then.
Besides that, my experience with Linux gaming is that it was absolutely not plug and play, it required me a lot of experimenting, changing proton versions, keeping myself up-to-date on the latest env variable to fix issues with my games, disabling composition on your DE, etc etc and etc.
I used to have fun tinkering with this stuff, nowadays I don't have the time/energy/will to educate myself on the latest tools to run a game, so I just keep a windows partition for gaming purposes.
I am very impressed by what Proton brings to the table (even though it's just standing upon the shoulders of Wine, it brings a whole new level of convenience to something which used to be rather hacky), but I've still experienced a few issues when using it. For example, one game I tried (Wargroove) had pretty substantial input lag when using it (which makes using your mouse feel really bad) and I tried Elden Ring on Linux yesterday. I'm very impressed that it launched at all, but it detected tampering and wouldn't let me online, and the game appeared to perform noticeably worse than it does on the same hardware when playing on Windows.
Here's how to run Elden Ring with actually better performance than Windows:
- Use the latest Proton-GE or Proton Experimental (and switch to its bleeding edge branch). That fixes the anticheat and it includes patches to work around the shoddy DX12 logic in the game.
- If you're running on RDNA2, you might want to install mesa 22 or the latest git version. This is crucial for the best performance.
- On most AMD cards, it's worth trying to force the GPU frequencies to max. For some reason the GPU doesn't stay in high perf mode and it's a cause of frame drops.
The game stutters a bit on Windows and frame rate is inconsistent, while I have stable 60 fps on 4k Maximum quality on Linux. I've played 6h non stop today.
There's actually a surprising amount of games that run better on Linux:
- Overwatch averages more stable framerates than equivalent hardware playing on Windows
- Apex Legends seems to run head-and-shoulders above what I experienced on Windows
- Half Life, Garry's Mod, and all of the Source engine games have wonderful native ports
- Older games like Diablo 2 are actually playable on Linux, where they're almost completely broken and dead on Windows
- This one is purely anecdotal, but MMOs seem to be much lighter on Linux. Games like Warframe, Diablo 3, and Final Fantasy 14 are light as a feather with accommodating hardware.
YMMV, but I'd say the state of gaming on Linux is very good right now. Maybe not as competitive as Windows is in market share and title compatibility, but it's far surpassing the selection (and performance) of PC games on Mac in it's glory days, and well outpacing the state of gaming on Mac now. If Valve continues to focus on their core competencies, we might finally have the gaming duopoly that we've rumored of for decades.
Nothing. Elden Ring is here, it's the new big thing, and I'm playing it on my Fedora box. The future is now. All of the games I play or want to play are running great, and I play a lot.
Truthfully, hacks might be needed, it's not grandma time yet for Linux gaming, but the hard part (Windows translation layer) is working really well.
With steam on Linux, I can happily play Bioshock Infinite, but not Bioshock 1 or 2. I can play The Witcher 2, but not The Witcher 1 or 3. I tend to play open-world RPGs, so one of my pet peeves is not being able to play any of the Elder Scrolls games on Linux. Without frequent crashes, I mean.
Your experience is different from mine. I have played the witcher 1, 2 and 3, and skyrim, oblivion and morrowind on proton without much crash. In fact, I never encountered any crash when playing the witcher 1, 2 and 3 under proton. Elder scroll and fallout games are sometimes crashy, but they're no more crashy than on windows and console.
The Witcher 2 and Bioshock Infinite never crashed in my setup, and I played them for hours a day last year! I'll have to try again with the others, they're the only reason I double boot to Windows.
I played Witcher 3 on Linux yesterday evening, it runs perfectly and it's listed as Platinum on Protondb (to be back on topic). I haven't played Bioshock in a while but according to reports it should work well,as with the Elder Scroll games.
I daily drive Linux and attempt to game on it when I can.
The biggest obstacles (at least for Proton) keeping me from deleting my Windows partition:
- Online multiplayer games with anti-cheat (solved or soon to be solved by EAC + Proton integration)
- The fact that not every game "just works". I frequently run into games (most recently, Elden Ring) which don't even launch, and the error/bug reporting experience is terrible. I'm a relatively technical person, and yet even after going through the trouble to get logging set up and figure out what is even going on when the game doesn't launch, there is still often not a clear path to fixing my problem. Obviously some of this is just inherent in the combinatoric explosion of problematic cases you get from running a DX -> Vulkan compatibility shim for an OS with 100s of distros, but it's a big obstacle.
- I recently got a top of the line GPU, but before that the performance difference was occasionally enough that I would just switch to Windows for a game that otherwise worked OK on Linux.
Nothing. Been using arch (and ubuntu previously) exclusively for years. Recently finished darksouls 1 and 2. Been playing elden ring this week. The vast majority of games I want to play either just work or require a one time config change.
There are tons of reports on Proton DB (and my experience agrees) where there are slow downs and stutters that just don't happen on Windows. Spyro: Reignited and Batman Arkham City are some recent examples for me.
I've played a few games that I can run at 4K with frame rates I don't notice any problem in, where with Proton it isn't the same experience.
Honestly Proton is catching up a lot and the compatibility is impressive but I've had my fair share of problems with it, e.g. on Ice Lake graphics it performed really badly for some simple games without running experimental branches, input was laggy on a few games, simply busted rendering, etc. This can be fixed with time, patches, experimental branches and bug reports, but if you want to play the latest stuff it's all a bit of a chore to some extent. So, more or less, the usual complaints you read about Linux and have been reading about for years, if you're a Linux fan. I think a lot of the old adage "post your specs" applies here; drivers and graphics cards alone will have a massive impact on compatibility, so it's hard to "guestimate" how valid some reports or issues really are without trying the game.
For some older titles though I've been relatively impressed by Proton and e.g. CrossOver. Like Shadow of the Tomb Raider or Witcher 3. You can't play simple 2D games released this year but a 5 year old AAA game can run mostly OK, stuff like that.
There is also a flip side to the billion knobs thing which is that Linux might actually be a reasonable route to run some older games in the future, e.g. games like Deus Ex HR had some fun mods but some of them eventually became incompatible with newer Windows versions. It's not a guarantee (some of these games/mods do insane things) but for some classes of games, things like patched proton/wine builds may be a valid way to preserve them more easily into the future.
Primarily just because I couldn't use my VR headset then (Quest 2). The volunteers behind ALVR are working on it.
However, when something like ALVR works on Linux and SteamOS 3.0 releases universally I I'll at least make a partition for it and try to use it as my primary gaming OS.
(Flex ahead) Not had very many gaming related problems with my Steam Deck, so I am hopeful for the universal release.
It’s a lot easier to just use Windows for gaming. It takes some amount of extra effort for many game types on Linux, including making sure you have all the pre requisite packages installed for wine and whatnot. Granted, that’s not hard, but it is extra effort to ensure everything will work.
But my personal gaming is dictated a lot by what my friends are playing, which means I prefer being ready to start a new game quickly without much hassle. And plenty of competitive multiplayer games are unsupported entirely on Linux.
I’m super excited for the future, but it just doesn’t fit my needs yet.
If you use steam, the only extra package you have to install are the 32bit graphics drivers if nvidia and mesa (if not nvidia) for 32bit native linux games and wine itself. Although sometime in the nearish future you won't have to do that for wine either.
If you want to ((use open-source drivers OR use wayland) AND play demanding games), that's true, AMD hardware is probably a better choice, but:
- if you're fine with the proprietary Nvidia drivers and Xorg, Nvidia hardware works great;
- if you play less demanding games, Intel hardware works great.
Steam and protondb really helps mitigate this. My Nvidia card that could run games well on Windows ran them acceptably on Ubuntu on steam. No extra setup or work, steam did it all. I believe via vulkan drivers and proton but I'm not 100% sure. And this was a few years ago
Some games use proprietary microsoft video codecs for cutscenes that are not supported by linux libraries. Proton was patched recently so that it just shows a TV test card. Before that it just crashed.
There was a post today discussing the Nvidea breach (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30550028) where people were discussing the Nvidea driving making their linux machines unbootable. That kind of thing, where a normal user would have trouble recovering from, that's a pretty big deal.
The real reason is vendor lockin, aka no support by nvidia, amd or intel because they are part of the trusted computing initiatve. The last 20 years Intel, AMD have been planning to lock down our PC's and close the platform. PC's from 1970's to the mid 90's were "honest" cpu's, or general computers.
Newer CPU's post 2008, have the elements of hardware drm Microsoft, intel, amd and the game and content industries have been testing. To get rid of local file access.
See here on the patent 20 years ago, aka windows 10/11 are the implementations of research that had been going on for 20 years to get rid of honest file access:
Basically when you open a file on a normal PC you get honest hex values (instructions) that made cracking copyprotection on software easy because you have access to the raw CPU instructions. It's hard to make eletronics that don't allow piracy because all a file is, is electric charges in memory, and the computer industry knows this. AKA electricity is not scarce so supply can always meet demand trivially. So they needed to come up with bullshit to justify breaking CPU circuits without killing performance (aka "Security or drm"), has a negative impact on performance and there's also the worry of bugs bricking your system if you do it wrong at the hardware level... this is why it's taken them 23+ years since the advent of trusted computing research that began in the mid 90's to finally get rid of honest executables.
When you compile a program in c, or any other programming language for 99% of computing history you'd get honest instructions in the resulting executable and files for the program. The computer industry wants to change this for their clients, the movie, game, and music industry. So they can enforce copyright at the hardware level. This is hard without breaking a computer, and they don't want a repeat of the pentium fdiv bug that caused a massive recall.
That is why mirosoft and intel/amd have been very very careful their trusted computing research and testing with certain big enterprise companies and consoles. Consoles is where trusted computing experiments in order to prevent game piracy.
All this to prevent you form getting honest files.
To give you an example of what's been goin on for 23 years...
Ultima 9 was cancelled (but then later restarted), AKA EA was planning on making Ultima 11, 12, 13, as local applications (you get complete files on your computer) WITH multiplayer embedded in the EXE, but the success of UO, changed the entire direction of PC Gaming. They wanted to kill piracy, this is the attitude of the game industry:
Basic computer science 101, two or more computers networked together become and behave as a single computer. AKA every program can be divided into two or more subprograms and run over a network, that means you lose control of your PC if you take up any client-server exe. AKA there is no program that can't be turned into a client-server app, why would you want all your applications dependent on a 2nd computer in microsoft or other companies office when there is no rational reason for this? Since that means you no longer own your pc.
We already had infinity multiplayer games in the 90's in quake 2, go listen here at John carmacks comment.
(somewhat paraphrasing) "No limit to the number of players inside a multiplayer world"
So no ultima online, everquest, guild wars 1 ad wow are literally just RPG's with network multiplayer removed and dumped into a seperate exe file and sold back to the public as if it were some new type of game. It isn't, it's the same game with fraudulently coded network code. They wanted to kill us getting complete games with multiplayer that were infinitely copyable like quake 2.
That is why modern Unreal engine FPS games like Transformers fall of cybertron have their multiplayer "shut down" because the general public bought into the MMO scam that led to steam. Steam was valves attack on game ownership and undermining local binaries. Note as steam grew, they started allowing devs to force update games to tie them to steams backend, aka many games won't work without steam loading, all pre-steam games work just fine minus "mmo's" which were the first drm games.
So yes the general gaming public were scammed and lead to the stolen PC game apocalypse we've been suffering for the last 23+ years.
So we have an unreal engine game (Transformers FoC) (2014)
And we got UT2004 a game from 2004 that has more features then modern incarnations, how did we end up going backwards in time in PC gaming?
They want to kill honest binaries (aka, access to raw hex instructions of programs allowing them to be cracked). UWP games on windows 10 was a trial run of trusted computing tech where windows update disabled cracked exe's, that's why UWP games can only run on certain verisons of windows 10. Windows 11 is that on steroids, Microsoft is lying because they know the average person using windows is clueless and tech illiterate. They learned that in 1997 with ultima online, everquest in 99 and wow in 2004. Client-server software is the same as buying a program with missing files. It's literally a broken application.
This is who they are designing it for, big media companies:
TC provides for a monitoring and reporting component to be mounted in future PCs. The preferred implementation in the first phase of TC emphasised the role of a `Fritz' chip - a smartcard chip or dongle soldered to the motherboard. The current version has five components - the Fritz chip, a `curtained memory' feature in the CPU, a security kernel in the operating system (the `Nexus' in Microsoft language), a security kernel in each TC application (the `NCA' in Microsoft-speak) and a back-end infrastructure of online security servers maintained by hardware and software vendors to tie the whole thing together.
The initial version of TC had Fritz supervising the boot process, so that the PC ended up in a predictable state, with known hardware and software. The current version has Fritz as a passive monitoring component that stores the hash of the machine state on start-up. This hash is computed using details of the hardware (audio card, video card etc) and the software (O/S, drivers, etc). If the machine ends up in the approved state, Fritz will make available to the operating system the cryptographic keys needed to decrypt TC applications and data. If it ends up in the wrong state, the hash will be wrong and Fritz won't release the right key. The machine may still be able to run non-TC apps and access non-TC data, but protected material will be unavailable.
The operating system security kernel (the `Nexus') bridges the gap between the Fritz chip and the application security components (the `NCAs'). It checks that the hardware components are on the TCG approved list, that the software components have been signed, and that none of them has a serial number that has been revoked. If there are significant changes to the PC's configuration, the machine must go online to be re-certified: the operating system manages this. The result is a PC booted into a known state with an approved combination of hardware and software (whose licences have not expired). Finally, the Nexus works together with new `curtained memory' features in the CPU to stop any TC app from reading or writing another TC app's data. These new features are called `Lagrande Technology' (LT) for the Intel CPUs and `TrustZone' for the ARM.
Once the machine is in an approved state, with a TC app loaded and shielded from interference by any other software, Fritz will certify this to third parties. For example, he will do an authentication protocol with Disney to prove that his machine is a suitable recipient of `Snow White'. This will mean certifying that the PC is currently running an authorised application program - MediaPlayer, DisneyPlayer, whatever - with its NCA properly loaded and shielded by curtained memory against debuggers or other tools that could be used to rip the content. The Disney server then sends encrypted data, with a key that Fritz will use to unseal it. Fritz makes the key available only to the authorised application and only so long as the environment remains `trustworthy'. For this purpose, `trustworthy' is defined by the security policy downloaded from a server under the control of the application owner. This means that Disney can decide to release its premium content only to a media player whose author agrees to enforce certain conditions. These might include restrictions on what hardware and software you use, or where in the world you're located. They can involve payment: Disney might insist, for example, that the application collect a dollar every time you view the movie. The application itself can be rented too. The possibilities seem to be limited only by the marketers' imagination.
I don’t think Proton is Valves endgame for Linux gaming.
It is necessary to kick off SteamOS, but in I’d guess they are betting on capturing market share with their devices and OS, so that developers will put in the time to do Linux ports.
Proton is always a catch-up game and can’t seem to be the end-all solution.
If Valve managed to acquire a good marker share, developers will care about having something that works in Valve's SteamOS, Microsoft will push developers to native ports if they tried to degrade Proton ports, so I think they'll prefer to keep their control over DirecX.
I'm planning to install Windows. It seems like you don't really lose anything doing so. If Linux can catch up someday, great! Until then, I just want a device that works.
> Really thought proton was an above board implementation.
It is. This is just fear mongering.
I can't think of a good reason why Microsoft would want to get in the way, here. Maybe if Windows was a major revenue stream for them, but they make most of that money through OEM licensing and the Deck is very unlikely to cut very deeply into gaming laptop or PC sales.
Beyond that, maybe Microsoft might view the Deck as a competitor to XBox itself, but the Deck is just such a niche product targeting different audience/use case that I don't see why they'd do anything anti-competitive to get in the way. It simply isn't worth the trouble.
Frankly, this just smells of anti-Microsoft sentiment that dates back to the 90s and early 2000s. But Microsoft is a very different company today.
Besides, in the absolute worst case (which I truly don't believe would ever happen), Valve could just start shipping Windows on these things.
Off topic: Each and every time I see this product mentioned I first think it's about (my) Stream Deck.
They're a wonderful piece of kit for desktop productivity, it's just fantastic how one may automate lighting, camera, web meeting joins etc.
Edit: Steam Deck itself looks phenomenal, I can't wait for it to become available in Australia. Huge kudos on the work done to help verify what titles are the most accessible on this new platform!
