Back in April 2018, Valve made an announcement that they are still working hard on making Linux a great place for gaming and continuing to invest significant resources in supporting Vulkan. In that announcement, Valve also mentioned they have other Linux initiatives they still can’t disclose to the public. Now we can confirm they are serious and the announcement is not a publicity stunt because the Steam client has a recent beta update that includes a new feature called Proton. It enables the installing and playing of Windows games within the Steam Linux client.
As usual here at Back2Gaming, we don’t just report about games and technology, we do our own tests if resources are available. Shown below is our game play video of Doom (2016) running on Ubuntu MATE 18.04 LTS with Mesa 18.1.6 as driver for AMD Radeon RX 580 8GB. The choppiness of the video is due to using OBS for recording at 60 FPS when the in-game frame rate is relatively very high. We didn’t limit the frame rate because we want to show that hitting above 60 FPS at 2560 x 1080 resolution is really easy with a Radeon RX 580 8GB. When there is no video recording, Doom (2016) on Linux runs very smooth.
(Important: Input “+r_renderapi 1” in the Steam Launch Option to force Doom in Vulkan mode.)
Proton is only experimental for now so you have to access the Steam client beta to use it. In the upper left corner of the Steam client, click on Steam then on Settings. In the Account section, look for the Beta Participation area then click the drop down box and select Steam Beta Update. Click OK then the Steam client would restart in beta mode with Proton enabled.
Related readings:
Newbie Friendly Guide to Using Linux for Gaming
Milestones of Linux as a Gaming Platform
More details of the announcement and the list of games that currently work with Proton can be found here. If you don’t like reading long lists, know that Doom VFR, Tekken 7, NieR: Automata, and S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Shadow of Chernobyl are confirmed by Valve to work with Proton.
Update:
The Linux gaming community is divided when it comes to playing games through Wine. Here are the usual arguments:
- Wine will negatively affect Linux game developers because a person who already bought a Windows game and finished it through Wine is not likely to buy again a copy when a Linux version is released. In short, it will kill the business of developing Linux versions of games.
- Wine will attract more game developers to develop games on Linux because usage of Wine will increase the number of Linux users.
We asked Alen Ladavac, the Chief Technology Officer of Croteam, about Croteam’s stance on Steam’s Proton. He didn’t answer for Croteam but gave his personal opinion and he believes that Valve is doing the right thing. Here is his exact words:
It’s firm #2. The logic behind #1, which is often perpetuated online, is very, very misinformed. You are unlikely to get a public explanation for it because exact details include various data which is vastly not public. What I can say is – you’re gonna have to trust me on this: Valve is doing the right move here – one that has potential to help a lot if the tech turns out to work well.
We also tried to ask Feral Interactive and Aspyr Media but they said they don’t have any comment right now.
3 Comments
Ziad Alexander
#1 is meaningless because Steam doesn’t sell separate games for different OSes. If a Linux version is released, it will more than likely be considered the same game on Steam.
A better argument there is that devs will possible rely on Proton to do the work of getting their games running on Linux for them and the number of native releases will drop.
I’m still in camp #2 though. Anything that increases the Linux market share is a good thing.
I guess I sort of understand the Linux devs’ dismay but when it comes to things like this I think the proper answer is “well, too bad!” Like obviously being able to play the Windows version of a game on both Windows and Linux is way more optimal than needing two separate versions. It’s like horse carriage builders protesting the invention of cars.