Massive upgrade to Linux Steam client: Windows games can now be played with Linux
This is
THE huge news of Linux for 2018. Valve
announced that they are now embedding Proton, their improved wine, inside the Linux native steam client, allowing it to launch every windows game of the steam marketplace with similar performance.
I know a
lot of gamers who have a dual boot only for gaming and are going to remove it to keep only Linux thanks to that improvement. This is big. This is very big. Added to the fact that AMD drivers are now open source and always performing better, this is definitely the year of linux on desktop for gaming.
Only downside I see: most companies will not bother port their games to Linux anymore. But few were doing it anyway.
Phoronix forums discussionAnd this is going to profit everyone even not gamers / not steam users, as they are upstreaming most of their work to Wine.
See from the official announcement:
Q: What is Proton exactly? How does it differ from normal Wine? Who worked on it?
Proton is a tool distribution based on a modified version of Wine. The included improvements to Wine have been designed and funded by Valve, in a joint development effort with CodeWeavers. Here are some examples of what we've been working on together since 2016:
- vkd3d[source.winehq.org], the Direct3D 12 implementation based on Vulkan
- The OpenVR and Steamworks native API bridges
- Many wined3d performance and functionality fixes for Direct3D 9 and Direct3D 11
- Overhauled fullscreen and gamepad support
- The "esync[github.com]" >patchset, for multi-threaded performance improvements
Modifications to Wine are submitted upstream if they're compatible with the goals and requirements of the larger Wine project; as a result, Wine users have been benefiting from parts of this work for over a year now. The rest is available as part of our source code repository for Proton and its modules.
In addition to that, we've been supporting the development of DXVK[github.com], the Direct3D 11 implementation based on Vulkan; the nature of this support includes:
- Employing the DXVK developer in our open-source graphics group since February 2018
- Providing direct support from our open-source graphics group to fix Mesa driver issues affecting DXVK, and provide prototype
- implementations of brand new Vulkan features to improve DXVK functionality
- Working with our partners over at Khronos, NVIDIA, Intel and AMD to coordinate Vulkan feature and driver support
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