What Is The Steam Proton Compatibility Layer? And How Do You Use It?
170In this video I explain what Steam Proton is, what technologies are involved, and how to enable it.
In summary, Proton is a tool for use with the Steam client which allows games which are exclusive to Windows to run on the Linux operating system.
This is achieved by using a compatibility layer called Wine, technologies such as DXVK and vkd3d-proton which translate from the Microsoft DirectX graphic API to Vulkan, a cross platform graphic API.
More specifically DXVK translates from DirectX 9,10 and 11 to Vulkan whereas vkd3d-proton handles DirectX 12 translation.
In most cases the performance hit from translating is usually minimum, roughly 5 - 10% but this does depend on the hardware used and the game itself.
Proton is an attempt from Valve to incorporate all these technologies, as well as some additional tweaks, into an easy to enable toggle within Steam in order to lower the barrier of entry for new users of Linux when it comes to gaming.
The vast majority of games available on Steam, do now work with Proton, but some noticeable exceptions do not, which often include games that use kernel level anti-cheat such as EAC or BattlEye or DirectX 12 games that use graphic extensions not yet supported by vkd3d-proton.
You can check compatibility with your game library by visiting the website ProtonDB.
References.
Vulkan - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vulkan
WINE - https://www.winehq.org/
DXVK - https://github.com/doitsujin/dxvk#dxvk
vkd3d-proton - https://github.com/HansKristian-Work/vkd3d-proton#vkd3d-proton
#proton #linuxgaming #steam