Valve wants to run all Windows games on Linux

Valve introduced the project Proton - launching Windows-based games on Linux.


Illustration wccftech.com

Valve decided not to dwell on the release of SteamOS, its gaming version of Linux, and announced the release of a beta version of the Steam Play service with a modified version of Wine, codenamed Proton. The new version of the software allows, no less, to run Windows-games on Linux straight from Steam. In general, the Proton project has a very ambitious goal - to ensure that all Windows games in the Steam directory can run under Linux, which is called out of the box.



At the moment, announced the full support of 26 games. In addition, enthusiasts can try to run any game, using the option Enable Steam Play for all titles in the settings. All results of attempts to launch games are recorded in a google-table .

• Games on Windows without an available version for Linux can now be downloaded and run directly from the Steam client on Linux, which already has support for Steamworks and OpenVR.
• DirectX 11 and 12 implementations are now based on Vulkan, which improves game compatibility and reduces performance impact.
• Improved support for full-screen mode: the games will be perfectly stretched to the screen of the desired size, while the built-in monitor resolution will not be distorted and will not require the use of a virtual desktop.
• Improved support for game controllers: the game will automatically recognize all controllers supported on Steam. Expected even greater compatibility with ready-made controllers compared to the original version of the game.
• The performance of multi-threaded games has improved significantly compared to the standard Wine.

To launch Proton, install the latest Steam Client beta for Linux.
For the beta version to work correctly, the system requires fresh drivers for the NVIDIA video card with a version not lower than 396.51 or Intel / AMD from the Mesa 18.2.0 package, in addition, an increase in the limit by the number of open file descriptors is required. For Ubuntu 18.04, new NVIDIA and Mesa driver versions can be installed from PPA repositories ( NVIDIA , Mesa ).



The project's developments are published on GitHub with a BSD source code license. Development has been underway for more than two years with the direct participation of the Wine HQ team, and many changes are already being transferred to the original Wine project and related projects, such as DXVK and vk3d.

In 2010, Valve announced the launch of the Steam Play service, which allows buying the game once and install it in any of the three popular OS families: Windows, macOS and Linux. Over the 8 years since then, more than 3,000 games in the Steam catalog have become available to Linux adepts, and the introduction of support for new games has not stopped until now.

However, simultaneously with attempts to expand the library of games on one platform, Valve decided to discontinue support for older systems on another platform. In June 2018, the company announced the completion of support for Windows XP and Vista.

PS I propose to share my experience running games in Linux in the comments