With Cyberpunk 2077 being the hot new thing in gaming, Valve and CodeWeavers are trying to ensure it can run nicely through the Steam Play Proton compatibility layer since it doesn't support Linux directly.

Valve recently set up a new branch of Proton named "Proton Experimental" along with the release of Proton 5.13-4 . It appears to be the version of Proton where Valve will be adding in fixes quicker, and more newer features. Yesterday, December 14, Valve developer Pierre-Loup Griffais mentioned the newest updates to Proton Experimental implements the Spatial Audio sound API which should fix Cyberpunk 2077 world sounds. Additionally there's more CPU performance improvements, which should help Path of Exile too.

Currently though, NVIDIA still has issues with it crashing and sometimes entirely locking systems on Linux. I tried it myself today thanks to a gift from a reader and the experience for me on an NVIDIA 1080 wasn't great. Ensuring to set my CPU into performance mode with High game settings it gave 30FPS and below, Medium gave a total freeze on the loading screen but a good 10FPS increase to between 30-40FPS in game when it does work (a little higher in more confined spaces).

Safe to say, you need a really high-powered computer for it right now, especially on Linux and not NVIDIA. That will change over time of course as CDPR optimize the game, as Valve optimise Proton and when NVIDIA sort the driver situation out. Even so, incredible it was working so soon with Proton on Linux.

Here's all the current additions in Proton Experimental:

• Beginnings of Wine architectural work to reduce CPU overhead and improve performance in scenarios related to input and windowing.
• Memory allocator performance improvements.
• Implemented the Spatial Audio sound API, fixing Cyberpunk 2077 world sounds.
• Updated vkd3d-proton to 2.1, fixing Cyberpunk 2077 facial animations.
• Improvements for non-US keyboard layouts.
• All other changes from 5.13-4.

As always you can find Proton info on GitHub and on our dedicated page .

With more titles out and planned to release that will use DirectX 12, the VKD3D-Proton translation layer is another essential bit of open source tech and a new release is out now.

The what: paired up with the Wine and Steam Play Proton translation layers, VKD3D-Proton will translate Direct3D 12 to Vulkan and hopefully allow you to run some more advanced Windows-only games and apps on Linux. VKD3D-Proton is the Valve fork of the original project from the Wine developers, with a priority on performance and game compatibility.

Today VKD3D-Proton 2.1 went up which mentions that The Division should work (which they missed from the 2.0 release notes), Assassin's Creed Valhalla should also now work but it needs NVIDIA GPUs due to features lacking on AMD for now, and also the big one being Cyberpunk 2077 which is why it works in the latest Proton release .

In regards to Cyberpunk 2077 with VKD3D-Proton and Steam Play Proton, they mention in the release notes that this is mainly for AMD as NVIDIA drivers are missing the VK_VALVE_mutable_descriptor_type extension which accidentally works around some fatal bugs within the game itself. Cyberpunk 2077 does work on NVIDIA GPUs but it will randomly hang and issues are likely to change over time since it's a new game, with a lot of bugs.

This release also has various other fixes for the likes of Horizon Zero Dawn and DIRT 5, there's multiple performance improvements, and other misc improvements.

See it on GitHub .

Two bits of major news to cover for the Steam Play Proton compatibility layer, with some exciting major changes coming in with updates. Don't know what Steam Play Proton is? Go take a look at our dedicated page .

Firstly, if you have an AMD GPU and you don't mind grabbing the latest development code for the Mesa graphics drivers - Cyberpunk 2077 should actually work on Linux with the new Proton 5.13-4 release. Valve developer Pierre-Loup Griffais mentioned that CD PROJEKT RED allowed them some early testing time to get the work done for both vkd3d (the Direct3D 12 to Vulkan layer) and radv (the AMD Mesa Vulkan driver). As an NVIDIA GPU owner, this makes me quite jealous as it seems my only other current choice on Linux is Stadia or GeForce NOW (unofficially - until later in 2021 ).

Additionally, there's now also a new Proton Experimental branch available which has the start of major architectural changes to Wine. This brings with it a plan to reduce CPU overhead and improve performance in scenarios related to input and windowing. Seems Proton Experimental is an additional version of Proton, so you would install it along side the other versions currently available for this compatibility tool.

You can find the Proton changelog here .

Valve and CodeWeavers have rolled out another smaller update to the Steam Play Proton compatibility layer.

Continuing to clean up the issues left from the big 5.13 release that now uses the newer container runtime, Proton 5.13-3 brings with it (hopefully) fixed controller hotplugging. Something I am sure many users will appreciate as that can be a nuisance when it doesn't work needing you to restart games.

Additionally they say that Yakuza: Like A Dragon, Soulcalibur 6, Lords of the Fallen, and Hammerting are now playable. That doesn't mean that don't still have issues though.

On top of that this release pulls in an update to the Direct3D to Vulkan translation layer DXVK with v1.7.3 and also FAudio 20.12 as well. Aside from that here's the bug fixes:

• Fix sound in Warframe and Ghostrunner.
• Fix flickering graphics in Serious Sam 4.
• Fix networking failures in Call of Duty: World War II.
• Fix Age of Empires II HD crash in multiplayer lobbies.
• Fix Paradox games launchers.

See the full changelog for Proton on GitHub . You can also follow our dedicated section .

The Proton compatibility layer used with Steam Play on Linux has a brand new release out with Proton 5.13-2. This release follows on from some Release Candidate builds earlier this week, to clean up some issues after the big initial Proton 5.13-1 release that went up in the middle of October.

Need more info on Steam Play and Proton? Check out our dedicated area for it.

Here's what's changed in the Proton 5.13-2 release:

• Updated vkd3d-proton to version 2.0 , which improves Direct3D 12 support.
• Fixed Risk of Rain 2 multiplayer lobbies.
• Fixed Killer Instinct crash when battle ends.
• Fixed Assetto Corsa Competizione and Summer Funland in VR mode.
• Fixed games not launching in Uplay Connect, and Origin crashing when updating.
• Fixed mouse cursor in Mount & Blade II: Bannerlord.
• Fixed SpellForce crash on launch on some systems.
• Fixed very long load times in Warhammer 40k: Inquisitor - Martyr.
• Atelier Ryza: Ever Darkness & the Secret Hideout is playable again.
• Fixed Healer's Quest and Coloring Game 2 on AMD.
• Scaled resolution now functional for Middle Earth: Shadow of War.
• Restore behavior of horizontal scrolling input from previous Proton versions.
• Proton log directory can now be configured with PROTON_LOG_DIR.

Full changelog can be seen here .

While Valve, CodeWeavers and Collabora all work together through contracts to make things better there's still a number of known issues right now including:

• Controller hot-plugging doesn't work
• System-wide Vulkan layers like MangoHUD or vkBasalt don't work
• Using a custom per-game driver (like with VK_ICD_FILENAMES or LIBGL_DRIVERS_PATH) doesn't work
• User hooks like LD_PRELOAD (like for MangoHUD OpenGL) don't work

Valve has released Proton 5.13-1 for testing, this compatibility layer for Steam Play brings with it many advancements for getting more Windows games working on Linux.

This is the first proper public release of Proton since 5.0-9 back in June, while they also had 5.0-10 left in testing back in July so no doubt this will be very exciting for fans of Proton. If you're not clear on what Proton and Steam Play are, be sure to check out our constantly updated dedicated page .

Before getting started, be aware this comes with a known issue with controllers / gamepads where hotplugging is currently broken in some titles. Apart from that, it sounds like a huge release including lots of new playable titles like Red Dead Redemption 2, Horizon Zero Dawn, DEATH STRANDING, Sea of Thieves, Age of Empires III, Call of Duty: WWII, Call of Duty: Infinite Warfare, Call of Duty: Modern Warfare and others.

Even more came with it though, there's better Steam client integration to fix Call of Duty titles, Spelunky 2, Torchlight III, Path of Exile and RPG Maker MZ. Video Playback is a big one, a constant nuisance for Proton and that's been worked on also with improved support for older video libraries and work continues on newer video libraries. Additionally titles like Halo 3, Beyond: Two Souls and Tomb Raider 2 should see better audio playback.

They also upgraded the Direct3D 9/10/10 to Vulkan layer DXVK to 1.7.2, FAudio to 20.10, pulled in the latest Direct3D 12 to Vulkan code from vkd3d-proton and they're even now building it against the next generation of the Steam Linux Runtime too.

The version of Wine that Proton is based upon, as the version suggests, has also been bumped up to Wine 5.13 and they said at least 256 of their changes from Proton 5.0 have either been up-streamed or they're just not needed.

Full changelog can be found here . You may need to manually install it in Steam, it will show up as Proton 5.13 in the Tools section in your Steam Library. You can then select to force it onto games individually to test with by right clicking on a game, going to Properties and then the Steam Play section at the bottom:

Two years ago to the date, Valve Software made an announcement that would change Linux gaming on Steam: that announcement was the new version of Steam Play with the Proton compatibility layer.

Proton is the Valve-funded fork of Wine, a compatibility layer designed to run Windows software on other systems. With Proton, Valve are focusing of course on games and Steam integration with the help of CodeWeavers. Two years on, there's a huge amount more AAA games (thousands) playable on Linux with a few clicks of a button ( guide ). Thanks to Proton, users moving over from Windows likely don't need to give up a lot of their games, since many should work well and the importance of that cannot be understated as a back catalogue is vital.

Steam Play itself as a feature is definitely very interesting and exciting when you look outside of just Proton too. It's enabled the creation of other compatibility layers like Boxtron for running DOSBox titles on Steam in a native Linux build of DOSBox and Roberta which does the same for ScummVM. Even further than that, it's also the way you can run dedicated Linux builds in a container with the Steam Linux Runtime (info: #1 , #2 ) to enable them to hopefully continuing running forever.

Since the original announcement, it's hard to say if Steam Play and Proton made much of a difference to the user share of Linux on Steam (see our Steam Tracker ). It seems mostly stable and hasn't budged much. Not that I expected it to mind you, we still have plenty of mountains to climb with the biggest being that the vast majority of PC hardware people buy comes pre-loaded with Windows 10. We've seen some movement there though with more Linux-focused vendors popping up over the years including: Entroware, Purism, Slimbook, StarLabs, TUXEDO and System76 also continuing to expand. Even Lenovo started moving to add more Fedora offerings and Ubuntu/RedHat too but a huge amount of work has to be done on that to improve things across many more top-tier vendors.

For those curious: there's currently no news to share on the status of anti-cheat support (mostly meaning Easy Anti-Cheat and BattlEye) for Proton. The unofficial work that seemed initially exciting had a major setback when EAC was updated and it all broke. That is just one of the many mountains this compatibility layer needs to overcome, somehow.

I'm still thoroughly curious on what the end game is here and why Valve continue to fund various Linux projects like Proton, Mesa driver improvements, the ACO AMD shader compiler, whatever Gamescope turns into and plenty of others. Will it end up being part of their quest to bring out their own full cloud gaming solution? They have a lot of the tech there ready for streaming and they might end up being one of the last major gaming companies to do it at this rate. Will it be for SteamOS 3.0 ? Just as a continued backup in case Microsoft lock down Windows? Or is it really just a few passionate Linux fans inside Valve? As always, they remain quite tight lipped about it and one day I hope they agree to my interview requests on it. The future of Linux gaming certainly is looking colourful.

Happy two years, Steam Play and Proton. What will the next two bring?

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Tags: Steam Play, Wine, New Release, Update

A brand new update to Steam Play Proton has arrived ahead of the weekend with Proton 4.11-10, giving out of the box play for Halo: The Master Chief Collection.

For Halo, you will need the Steam Beta Client if you're on an older distribution, plus online matchmaking still won't work due to Easy Anti-Cheat not supporting Steam Play Proton. However, single-player does work fine and you should be able to play with friends outside of matchmaking. I've tested this myself, and it does work first time without issues signing into Live:

Also added in this release of Proton is a claim of major mouse handling improvements. They said this improved the experience in Fallout 4, Furi, and Metal Gear Solid V. On the subject of input there's also force feedback improvements, an Xbox controller performance regression, and fixes for multiple games having problems with controller mapping like Telltale games with Xbox controllers and Cuphead and ICEY when using PlayStation 4 controllers over Bluetooth.

There's a new integer scaling mode available, which they said will "give sharp pixels when upscaling". You can enable it with the "WINE_FULLSCREEN_INTEGER_SCALING=1" environment variable.

Apart from that there's a fix for Metal Gear Solid V hanging on launch, Trine 4 should no longer be locked to 30 FPS and a frequent IL-2 Sturmovik crash should be solved. They also updated D9VK, FAudio and pulled in some misc DXVK bugfixes.

See the changelog here . To get the update, your Steam client should download it automatically. If not, ensure you have Proton 4.11 installed in the Tools menu.