5 years ago Valve released Proton forever changing Linux gaming
5 years ago Valve released Proton forever changing Linux gaming
Has it really been that long? Apparently so. Valve originally announced their rebranding of Steam Play with Proton back on August 21st, 2018. Seems like a good time for a quick reflection being halfway to a decade old now with the tech that gave rise to the Steam Deck.
cross-posted from: https://lemm.ee/post/4952617
Happy birthday, Proton!
It's important to remember that it's based on wine, which has been around for 30 years.
That's true for sure, but that doesn't mean that it's valve didn't do an absolute fuckload of work to get proton to be actually functional.
Getting direct3d and vulkan working with actually useful performance was the turning point for Wine being useful for games in addition to just standard applications.
They definitely spent an ass-load of money on that and the fact that Wine was around for 25 years before that just goes to show that no one else was willing to do that.
Getting direct3d and vulkan working with actually useful performance
They definitely spent an ass-load of money on that
[citation needed]
I'm not aware of Valve or Doitsujin ever revealing how much they paid him to make DXVK. I assume they paid him reasonably well, but I doubt it was an ass-load.
the fact that Wine was around for 25 years before that just goes to show that no one else was willing to do that.
Or maybe that Wine was a lot more work than the direct3d-to-vulkan shim that was done mainly by one person (now two people).
Valve definitely helped by funding a few key projects, and packaging them in Steam made them convenient to use, but I think exaggerating their role unfairly diminishes the much larger body of work (done by other people) that makes it possible at all.
Proton stands on the shoulders of giants.
I mostly agree with your comment, but...
the fact that Wine was around for 25 years before that just goes to show that no one else was willing to do that.
Remember that Wine is built by community of volunteers (afaik, tell me if I'm wrong), and they don't have as much resources as company worth billions USD.
direct3d Direct3D 11 and Direct3D12, to be precise. Direct3D9 was working fine before - and there even was native driver support for it in Mesa, that could be used together with a patched WINE.
I was able to ditch Windows completely thanks to them, haven't had to dual boot for years. I remember back when I first tried linux there were only a handful of games that would run without hours of tinkering. Now compatibility is an afterthought; I just assume Steam games will work and I haven't had any issues yet.
Problem for me is def going to be modding games, have they fixed alt tabbing between games and desktop yet at least? It used to "crash" the game for me if I tabbed out even for a second.
I've never had this issue but it might be specific to the game you're trying, using gamescope might help.
You can try to use gamescope for that. Really useful for games that crash alt-tabbing
The only (large enough) area which is currently lacking is multiplayer games, especially those with anticheats. Unfortunately, there's nothing users can do about that other than wait for game developers to enable wine support, which, despite EAC and Battleye significantly simplifying the process, many still haven't done.
Huge kudos to them, they saw that they were on top of the PC market and wanted to expand, and they found the market of linux users who wanted to game on their machines too. Wine wasn't up to par for gaming and they took it and ran with it. Beyond that they open sourced proton too, something most companies wouldn't have done. Even if they quit now the help they gave to the linux community is immeasurable
Proton is based on wine, which is copyleft so valve didn't exactly have a choice in keeping it open source. I also don't necessarily think that their goal was to reach the rather small existing user base of Linux users, but rather they wanted to make sure they aren't at the will of a bigger company (Microsoft) whose product is/was required to run most of what valve makes money with.
Linux users (me included) are only a few percents of all PC users. I don't think they did it for us as a market, more to have an alternative to windows if they start closing down more (started with Windows 8 I believe). First try they fumbled a bit with the Steam Machines (Stream OS and proton weren't there yet and the prices were not really competitive) and now nailed it with the Steam Deck. I do love that they seem to care about openness to some degree!
Pretty sure codeweavers played a huge part in that.
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A lot of the early porting work that came along was slowly dying off since the Steam Machines didn't provide the boost Valve and Linux gamers were hoping for.
Side-note: John Carmack (id Software / Oculus VR / Keen Technologies) even thought Wine was the solution back in 2013.
Valve has funded a lot of extra work though to get things like DXVK and VKD3D-Proton for the translation from Direct3D to Vulkan into a state where performance can be really great!
Games like Deep Rock Galactic, God of War, Death Stranding, Baldur’s Gate 3, Brotato, Beat Saber and so on.
You get the idea, there’s a truly ridiculous selection of games available and at times it’s a little paralysing scrolling through my Steam Library deciding what to play — a delightfully annoying problem to have huh?
Valve produce updates to Proton constantly to improve compatibility, with over 300 revisions to the main changelog (although some a minor text corrections) it's clear to see how much work goes into it.
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