I remember when Proton launched it was like magic playing games like Doom and Nier Automata straight from the Linux Steam client with excellent performance. I do not miss the days of having the Windows version of Steam installed separately.
in my case pretty much all heavy games work much better on Linux than on windows(laptop came with windows, so tested before putting Linux on it and then compared). in many cases I get around 1.5 to 2 times the performance, stability is also much greater, this is both for new and old games. that said I tend to avoid those games with insane mallware(drm) in it.
system uses a apu and has only 16gb ram and 1.5tb nvme ssd. so might also be it has a much bigger effects on APU since Linux handles ram much better. but if a system suffers from other similar bottlenecks like: storage, ram, compute, TDP and thermal, etc. problems should also result in much better performance when switching to Linux. I guess the only exception would be if the GPU compute power would litterally 100% be the only bottleneck, or close to that, but in a APU(where one might assume games to be heavily bottlenecked by GPU compute power) GNU+Linux gives much better performance.
also this was tested on Garuda Linux KDE Dragonized edition, and changed the kernel to a newer one since by default it will use a kernel optimized or first gen ryzen. which gives some issues and lower performance.
In the time I have been a Linux gamer, it has gone from “here is a list of games that work in Linux” to “here is a list of games that do not work in Linux.” Which some dictionaries define as “progress.”
In 2003, it was my dream to play FF7 in Linux. In 2019, my dream came true. Thanks Proton, Codeweavers, Wine, Valve, et al for helping me finally put down Sephiroth right.
That’s crazy! When I was last trying to run Linux full time in ~2014, you had WINE and then a commercial version of WINE (not by the WINE devs, but because WINE is licensed the way it is and is open source…) that would run a few more things, but I don’t remember what it was called.
So glad to hear it’s progressing this quickly and far.
I started out in 2014, and pretty much what I did was look to see if there was a Steam logo on the Steam store page to indicate Linux compatibility. With Proton in the last few years, I just don’t really worry about it. I will say my tastes have just about always lined up with the kinds of games, the kinds of studios, that are likely to publish for Linux, the nerd shit like Kerbal Space Program and Factorio. I don’t play Call of Fifa, Modern Fortnite or whatever.
What about Red Theft Autoredemption, or Overwatch of Legends? 😆
